The Fitzwilliam Museum celebrates William Blake's Universe
Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum explores the bold and imaginative works of the artist within the context of their time...
By
Susan Gray
March 5, 2024
The late eighteenth century is having a moment in the sun; at the Royal Academy Entangled Pasts shines a light on the imperialism, political movements, economy and forces of dissent at the time of its foundation in 1768, while in Cambridge the Fitzwilliam Museum is exploring this revolutionary era through William Blake and his European contemporaries.
Blake (1757-1827) expressed his visionary ideas by combining printing, painting and poetry, making a meagre living as an engraver. The world changed drastically in his lifetime, from revolution and war in America and Europe to the struggle to abolish slavery and the expansion of the British Empire. Blake was part of a constellation of artists and writers in Europe concerned with renewed spirituality in art and life in the late 1700s. In Germany artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich engaged with similar ideas to Blake and, while they did not know his work, a shared quest to use art to convey their visions of spiritual renewal links these artists.
Blake was friends with Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, who settled in England in 1779, and they shared a radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Fuseli’s Self Portrait (1780s), in black and white chalk on buff paper, is one of the show’s opening works. The melancholic expression, with the artist’s face held in sketchy hands, can be compared with Catherine Blake’s likely posthumous portrait of her husband as a young man, produced around 1830. Made after Blake’s death, it is one of the few surviving artworks by Catherine. Using graphite on paper, she imagines her husband with hair-like flames coming out of his head, the source of his visions.
The poster image for the show, Satan or Head of a Damned Soul (1789-90), Blake after Fuseli, emphasises the connection between the two artists. Engraved and etched on paper, the contorted head with rolling, vacant eyes probably represents a sinner from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Incorporating Fuseli’s dramatic, exaggerated gestures and distorted poses, this contrasts with Blake’s more typical works in which figures seem symbolic rather than life-like. Fuseli’s Seated female figure (1805-10), showing the back view of a nude woman, forcefully tugging her long hair away from her scalp, communicates a sentient, crackling, relatable energy not always so apparent in Blake.
Works underlining the precarious nature of Blake’s livelihood are dotted throughout the show. F[rench] Revolution, engraving for Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793), illustrates a passage from a royalist history and shows royal guards fending off an attack on King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Versailles in 1789, an image Blake would likely have been politically opposed to which he produced as a commercial engraver. Mock draping at the top of the plane and staged expression of the two principal characters, are perhaps giveaways on the artist’s feeling towards the commission. A more disturbing work is Blake’s engravings for J.G. Stedman’s Narratives of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, published in 1796. Although Stedman was not an abolitionist, the text was taken up as an important work in the antislavery movement. Blake’s fifteen engravings were based on Stedman’s own, now lost, illustrations and show women and children being directed by a towering overseer with a stick, and an idealised trio of three naked women representing Europe supported by Africa and America.
The dream-like Song of Los (1795) presents a more familiar image of Blakean imagery, demonstrating his skills as a printer and illustrator. In four (out of eight) plates we see a fantastical conflict between a fading Urizen, representing rationalism, and Los the prophet, poet and artist. We see Los on his knees worshipping a besmirched sun, covered in blotches of blue, black and brown. More charmingly, another plate depicts a sleeping, supine queen and a king clad in red, on a giant lily, surrounded by stars. Los rests from his labours, and shows a renewed, pale- skinned and boyish Los leaning against his hammer, with which he will forge a new glowing sun of the imagination.
By the early 1790s the Book of Revelation had become associated with sympathy for the French Revolution, drawing on its description of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who unleash war, pestilence, famine and death on the world as a prelude to the redemption of the virtuous. Displaying Blake’s Death on a Pale Horse (1800), drawn from the Revelation passage ‘And behold a pale horse: and name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ next to works on paper, with related titles, by Benjamin West and James Gillray, show how embedded Blake was in the concerns of his time. West’s naturalistic depiction captures the carnage and contrasting whiteness of the animals and Gillray draws attention to the foolhardiness of the rider, modelled on Prime Minister William Pitt, while Blake’s rider is a medieval warrior king, held aloft by a fiery, scaly mythological creature, but enveloped at the top of the frame by the arms of a watchful female figure.
Two further treats in Blake’s Universe are the artist’s largest surviving painting An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man (1811) and Caspar David Friedrich’s Seven Sketches in Sepia, The Ages of Man (1826). Friedrich’s seven seasons spanning from sunrise to angels on clouds are almost photographic, and encapsulate ideas of the romantic sublime. Blake’s painting tells the story of creation in Biblical allegory, with the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity standing beneath a soul being carried to heaven, an encapsulation of how William Blake’s Universe illuminates the artist’s work through insight into his times.
William Blake's Universe is showing at The Fitzwilliam Museum until 19th May 2024
The late eighteenth century is having a moment in the sun; at the Royal Academy Entangled Pasts shines a light on the imperialism, political movements, economy and forces of dissent at the time of its foundation in 1768, while in Cambridge the Fitzwilliam Museum is exploring this revolutionary era through William Blake and his European contemporaries.
Blake (1757-1827) expressed his visionary ideas by combining printing, painting and poetry, making a meagre living as an engraver. The world changed drastically in his lifetime, from revolution and war in America and Europe to the struggle to abolish slavery and the expansion of the British Empire. Blake was part of a constellation of artists and writers in Europe concerned with renewed spirituality in art and life in the late 1700s. In Germany artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich engaged with similar ideas to Blake and, while they did not know his work, a shared quest to use art to convey their visions of spiritual renewal links these artists.
Blake was friends with Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, who settled in England in 1779, and they shared a radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Fuseli’s Self Portrait (1780s), in black and white chalk on buff paper, is one of the show’s opening works. The melancholic expression, with the artist’s face held in sketchy hands, can be compared with Catherine Blake’s likely posthumous portrait of her husband as a young man, produced around 1830. Made after Blake’s death, it is one of the few surviving artworks by Catherine. Using graphite on paper, she imagines her husband with hair-like flames coming out of his head, the source of his visions.
The poster image for the show, Satan or Head of a Damned Soul (1789-90), Blake after Fuseli, emphasises the connection between the two artists. Engraved and etched on paper, the contorted head with rolling, vacant eyes probably represents a sinner from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Incorporating Fuseli’s dramatic, exaggerated gestures and distorted poses, this contrasts with Blake’s more typical works in which figures seem symbolic rather than life-like. Fuseli’s Seated female figure (1805-10), showing the back view of a nude woman, forcefully tugging her long hair away from her scalp, communicates a sentient, crackling, relatable energy not always so apparent in Blake.
Works underlining the precarious nature of Blake’s livelihood are dotted throughout the show. F[rench] Revolution, engraving for Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793), illustrates a passage from a royalist history and shows royal guards fending off an attack on King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Versailles in 1789, an image Blake would likely have been politically opposed to which he produced as a commercial engraver. Mock draping at the top of the plane and staged expression of the two principal characters, are perhaps giveaways on the artist’s feeling towards the commission. A more disturbing work is Blake’s engravings for J.G. Stedman’s Narratives of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, published in 1796. Although Stedman was not an abolitionist, the text was taken up as an important work in the antislavery movement. Blake’s fifteen engravings were based on Stedman’s own, now lost, illustrations and show women and children being directed by a towering overseer with a stick, and an idealised trio of three naked women representing Europe supported by Africa and America.
The dream-like Song of Los (1795) presents a more familiar image of Blakean imagery, demonstrating his skills as a printer and illustrator. In four (out of eight) plates we see a fantastical conflict between a fading Urizen, representing rationalism, and Los the prophet, poet and artist. We see Los on his knees worshipping a besmirched sun, covered in blotches of blue, black and brown. More charmingly, another plate depicts a sleeping, supine queen and a king clad in red, on a giant lily, surrounded by stars. Los rests from his labours, and shows a renewed, pale- skinned and boyish Los leaning against his hammer, with which he will forge a new glowing sun of the imagination.
By the early 1790s the Book of Revelation had become associated with sympathy for the French Revolution, drawing on its description of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who unleash war, pestilence, famine and death on the world as a prelude to the redemption of the virtuous. Displaying Blake’s Death on a Pale Horse (1800), drawn from the Revelation passage ‘And behold a pale horse: and name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ next to works on paper, with related titles, by Benjamin West and James Gillray, show how embedded Blake was in the concerns of his time. West’s naturalistic depiction captures the carnage and contrasting whiteness of the animals and Gillray draws attention to the foolhardiness of the rider, modelled on Prime Minister William Pitt, while Blake’s rider is a medieval warrior king, held aloft by a fiery, scaly mythological creature, but enveloped at the top of the frame by the arms of a watchful female figure.
Two further treats in Blake’s Universe are the artist’s largest surviving painting An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man (1811) and Caspar David Friedrich’s Seven Sketches in Sepia, The Ages of Man (1826). Friedrich’s seven seasons spanning from sunrise to angels on clouds are almost photographic, and encapsulate ideas of the romantic sublime. Blake’s painting tells the story of creation in Biblical allegory, with the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity standing beneath a soul being carried to heaven, an encapsulation of how William Blake’s Universe illuminates the artist’s work through insight into his times.
William Blake's Universe is showing at The Fitzwilliam Museum until 19th May 2024
The late eighteenth century is having a moment in the sun; at the Royal Academy Entangled Pasts shines a light on the imperialism, political movements, economy and forces of dissent at the time of its foundation in 1768, while in Cambridge the Fitzwilliam Museum is exploring this revolutionary era through William Blake and his European contemporaries.
Blake (1757-1827) expressed his visionary ideas by combining printing, painting and poetry, making a meagre living as an engraver. The world changed drastically in his lifetime, from revolution and war in America and Europe to the struggle to abolish slavery and the expansion of the British Empire. Blake was part of a constellation of artists and writers in Europe concerned with renewed spirituality in art and life in the late 1700s. In Germany artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich engaged with similar ideas to Blake and, while they did not know his work, a shared quest to use art to convey their visions of spiritual renewal links these artists.
Blake was friends with Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, who settled in England in 1779, and they shared a radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Fuseli’s Self Portrait (1780s), in black and white chalk on buff paper, is one of the show’s opening works. The melancholic expression, with the artist’s face held in sketchy hands, can be compared with Catherine Blake’s likely posthumous portrait of her husband as a young man, produced around 1830. Made after Blake’s death, it is one of the few surviving artworks by Catherine. Using graphite on paper, she imagines her husband with hair-like flames coming out of his head, the source of his visions.
The poster image for the show, Satan or Head of a Damned Soul (1789-90), Blake after Fuseli, emphasises the connection between the two artists. Engraved and etched on paper, the contorted head with rolling, vacant eyes probably represents a sinner from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Incorporating Fuseli’s dramatic, exaggerated gestures and distorted poses, this contrasts with Blake’s more typical works in which figures seem symbolic rather than life-like. Fuseli’s Seated female figure (1805-10), showing the back view of a nude woman, forcefully tugging her long hair away from her scalp, communicates a sentient, crackling, relatable energy not always so apparent in Blake.
Works underlining the precarious nature of Blake’s livelihood are dotted throughout the show. F[rench] Revolution, engraving for Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793), illustrates a passage from a royalist history and shows royal guards fending off an attack on King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Versailles in 1789, an image Blake would likely have been politically opposed to which he produced as a commercial engraver. Mock draping at the top of the plane and staged expression of the two principal characters, are perhaps giveaways on the artist’s feeling towards the commission. A more disturbing work is Blake’s engravings for J.G. Stedman’s Narratives of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, published in 1796. Although Stedman was not an abolitionist, the text was taken up as an important work in the antislavery movement. Blake’s fifteen engravings were based on Stedman’s own, now lost, illustrations and show women and children being directed by a towering overseer with a stick, and an idealised trio of three naked women representing Europe supported by Africa and America.
The dream-like Song of Los (1795) presents a more familiar image of Blakean imagery, demonstrating his skills as a printer and illustrator. In four (out of eight) plates we see a fantastical conflict between a fading Urizen, representing rationalism, and Los the prophet, poet and artist. We see Los on his knees worshipping a besmirched sun, covered in blotches of blue, black and brown. More charmingly, another plate depicts a sleeping, supine queen and a king clad in red, on a giant lily, surrounded by stars. Los rests from his labours, and shows a renewed, pale- skinned and boyish Los leaning against his hammer, with which he will forge a new glowing sun of the imagination.
By the early 1790s the Book of Revelation had become associated with sympathy for the French Revolution, drawing on its description of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who unleash war, pestilence, famine and death on the world as a prelude to the redemption of the virtuous. Displaying Blake’s Death on a Pale Horse (1800), drawn from the Revelation passage ‘And behold a pale horse: and name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ next to works on paper, with related titles, by Benjamin West and James Gillray, show how embedded Blake was in the concerns of his time. West’s naturalistic depiction captures the carnage and contrasting whiteness of the animals and Gillray draws attention to the foolhardiness of the rider, modelled on Prime Minister William Pitt, while Blake’s rider is a medieval warrior king, held aloft by a fiery, scaly mythological creature, but enveloped at the top of the frame by the arms of a watchful female figure.
Two further treats in Blake’s Universe are the artist’s largest surviving painting An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man (1811) and Caspar David Friedrich’s Seven Sketches in Sepia, The Ages of Man (1826). Friedrich’s seven seasons spanning from sunrise to angels on clouds are almost photographic, and encapsulate ideas of the romantic sublime. Blake’s painting tells the story of creation in Biblical allegory, with the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity standing beneath a soul being carried to heaven, an encapsulation of how William Blake’s Universe illuminates the artist’s work through insight into his times.
William Blake's Universe is showing at The Fitzwilliam Museum until 19th May 2024
The late eighteenth century is having a moment in the sun; at the Royal Academy Entangled Pasts shines a light on the imperialism, political movements, economy and forces of dissent at the time of its foundation in 1768, while in Cambridge the Fitzwilliam Museum is exploring this revolutionary era through William Blake and his European contemporaries.
Blake (1757-1827) expressed his visionary ideas by combining printing, painting and poetry, making a meagre living as an engraver. The world changed drastically in his lifetime, from revolution and war in America and Europe to the struggle to abolish slavery and the expansion of the British Empire. Blake was part of a constellation of artists and writers in Europe concerned with renewed spirituality in art and life in the late 1700s. In Germany artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich engaged with similar ideas to Blake and, while they did not know his work, a shared quest to use art to convey their visions of spiritual renewal links these artists.
Blake was friends with Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, who settled in England in 1779, and they shared a radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Fuseli’s Self Portrait (1780s), in black and white chalk on buff paper, is one of the show’s opening works. The melancholic expression, with the artist’s face held in sketchy hands, can be compared with Catherine Blake’s likely posthumous portrait of her husband as a young man, produced around 1830. Made after Blake’s death, it is one of the few surviving artworks by Catherine. Using graphite on paper, she imagines her husband with hair-like flames coming out of his head, the source of his visions.
The poster image for the show, Satan or Head of a Damned Soul (1789-90), Blake after Fuseli, emphasises the connection between the two artists. Engraved and etched on paper, the contorted head with rolling, vacant eyes probably represents a sinner from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Incorporating Fuseli’s dramatic, exaggerated gestures and distorted poses, this contrasts with Blake’s more typical works in which figures seem symbolic rather than life-like. Fuseli’s Seated female figure (1805-10), showing the back view of a nude woman, forcefully tugging her long hair away from her scalp, communicates a sentient, crackling, relatable energy not always so apparent in Blake.
Works underlining the precarious nature of Blake’s livelihood are dotted throughout the show. F[rench] Revolution, engraving for Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793), illustrates a passage from a royalist history and shows royal guards fending off an attack on King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Versailles in 1789, an image Blake would likely have been politically opposed to which he produced as a commercial engraver. Mock draping at the top of the plane and staged expression of the two principal characters, are perhaps giveaways on the artist’s feeling towards the commission. A more disturbing work is Blake’s engravings for J.G. Stedman’s Narratives of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, published in 1796. Although Stedman was not an abolitionist, the text was taken up as an important work in the antislavery movement. Blake’s fifteen engravings were based on Stedman’s own, now lost, illustrations and show women and children being directed by a towering overseer with a stick, and an idealised trio of three naked women representing Europe supported by Africa and America.
The dream-like Song of Los (1795) presents a more familiar image of Blakean imagery, demonstrating his skills as a printer and illustrator. In four (out of eight) plates we see a fantastical conflict between a fading Urizen, representing rationalism, and Los the prophet, poet and artist. We see Los on his knees worshipping a besmirched sun, covered in blotches of blue, black and brown. More charmingly, another plate depicts a sleeping, supine queen and a king clad in red, on a giant lily, surrounded by stars. Los rests from his labours, and shows a renewed, pale- skinned and boyish Los leaning against his hammer, with which he will forge a new glowing sun of the imagination.
By the early 1790s the Book of Revelation had become associated with sympathy for the French Revolution, drawing on its description of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who unleash war, pestilence, famine and death on the world as a prelude to the redemption of the virtuous. Displaying Blake’s Death on a Pale Horse (1800), drawn from the Revelation passage ‘And behold a pale horse: and name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ next to works on paper, with related titles, by Benjamin West and James Gillray, show how embedded Blake was in the concerns of his time. West’s naturalistic depiction captures the carnage and contrasting whiteness of the animals and Gillray draws attention to the foolhardiness of the rider, modelled on Prime Minister William Pitt, while Blake’s rider is a medieval warrior king, held aloft by a fiery, scaly mythological creature, but enveloped at the top of the frame by the arms of a watchful female figure.
Two further treats in Blake’s Universe are the artist’s largest surviving painting An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man (1811) and Caspar David Friedrich’s Seven Sketches in Sepia, The Ages of Man (1826). Friedrich’s seven seasons spanning from sunrise to angels on clouds are almost photographic, and encapsulate ideas of the romantic sublime. Blake’s painting tells the story of creation in Biblical allegory, with the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity standing beneath a soul being carried to heaven, an encapsulation of how William Blake’s Universe illuminates the artist’s work through insight into his times.
William Blake's Universe is showing at The Fitzwilliam Museum until 19th May 2024
The late eighteenth century is having a moment in the sun; at the Royal Academy Entangled Pasts shines a light on the imperialism, political movements, economy and forces of dissent at the time of its foundation in 1768, while in Cambridge the Fitzwilliam Museum is exploring this revolutionary era through William Blake and his European contemporaries.
Blake (1757-1827) expressed his visionary ideas by combining printing, painting and poetry, making a meagre living as an engraver. The world changed drastically in his lifetime, from revolution and war in America and Europe to the struggle to abolish slavery and the expansion of the British Empire. Blake was part of a constellation of artists and writers in Europe concerned with renewed spirituality in art and life in the late 1700s. In Germany artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich engaged with similar ideas to Blake and, while they did not know his work, a shared quest to use art to convey their visions of spiritual renewal links these artists.
Blake was friends with Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, who settled in England in 1779, and they shared a radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Fuseli’s Self Portrait (1780s), in black and white chalk on buff paper, is one of the show’s opening works. The melancholic expression, with the artist’s face held in sketchy hands, can be compared with Catherine Blake’s likely posthumous portrait of her husband as a young man, produced around 1830. Made after Blake’s death, it is one of the few surviving artworks by Catherine. Using graphite on paper, she imagines her husband with hair-like flames coming out of his head, the source of his visions.
The poster image for the show, Satan or Head of a Damned Soul (1789-90), Blake after Fuseli, emphasises the connection between the two artists. Engraved and etched on paper, the contorted head with rolling, vacant eyes probably represents a sinner from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Incorporating Fuseli’s dramatic, exaggerated gestures and distorted poses, this contrasts with Blake’s more typical works in which figures seem symbolic rather than life-like. Fuseli’s Seated female figure (1805-10), showing the back view of a nude woman, forcefully tugging her long hair away from her scalp, communicates a sentient, crackling, relatable energy not always so apparent in Blake.
Works underlining the precarious nature of Blake’s livelihood are dotted throughout the show. F[rench] Revolution, engraving for Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793), illustrates a passage from a royalist history and shows royal guards fending off an attack on King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Versailles in 1789, an image Blake would likely have been politically opposed to which he produced as a commercial engraver. Mock draping at the top of the plane and staged expression of the two principal characters, are perhaps giveaways on the artist’s feeling towards the commission. A more disturbing work is Blake’s engravings for J.G. Stedman’s Narratives of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, published in 1796. Although Stedman was not an abolitionist, the text was taken up as an important work in the antislavery movement. Blake’s fifteen engravings were based on Stedman’s own, now lost, illustrations and show women and children being directed by a towering overseer with a stick, and an idealised trio of three naked women representing Europe supported by Africa and America.
The dream-like Song of Los (1795) presents a more familiar image of Blakean imagery, demonstrating his skills as a printer and illustrator. In four (out of eight) plates we see a fantastical conflict between a fading Urizen, representing rationalism, and Los the prophet, poet and artist. We see Los on his knees worshipping a besmirched sun, covered in blotches of blue, black and brown. More charmingly, another plate depicts a sleeping, supine queen and a king clad in red, on a giant lily, surrounded by stars. Los rests from his labours, and shows a renewed, pale- skinned and boyish Los leaning against his hammer, with which he will forge a new glowing sun of the imagination.
By the early 1790s the Book of Revelation had become associated with sympathy for the French Revolution, drawing on its description of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who unleash war, pestilence, famine and death on the world as a prelude to the redemption of the virtuous. Displaying Blake’s Death on a Pale Horse (1800), drawn from the Revelation passage ‘And behold a pale horse: and name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ next to works on paper, with related titles, by Benjamin West and James Gillray, show how embedded Blake was in the concerns of his time. West’s naturalistic depiction captures the carnage and contrasting whiteness of the animals and Gillray draws attention to the foolhardiness of the rider, modelled on Prime Minister William Pitt, while Blake’s rider is a medieval warrior king, held aloft by a fiery, scaly mythological creature, but enveloped at the top of the frame by the arms of a watchful female figure.
Two further treats in Blake’s Universe are the artist’s largest surviving painting An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man (1811) and Caspar David Friedrich’s Seven Sketches in Sepia, The Ages of Man (1826). Friedrich’s seven seasons spanning from sunrise to angels on clouds are almost photographic, and encapsulate ideas of the romantic sublime. Blake’s painting tells the story of creation in Biblical allegory, with the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity standing beneath a soul being carried to heaven, an encapsulation of how William Blake’s Universe illuminates the artist’s work through insight into his times.
William Blake's Universe is showing at The Fitzwilliam Museum until 19th May 2024
The late eighteenth century is having a moment in the sun; at the Royal Academy Entangled Pasts shines a light on the imperialism, political movements, economy and forces of dissent at the time of its foundation in 1768, while in Cambridge the Fitzwilliam Museum is exploring this revolutionary era through William Blake and his European contemporaries.
Blake (1757-1827) expressed his visionary ideas by combining printing, painting and poetry, making a meagre living as an engraver. The world changed drastically in his lifetime, from revolution and war in America and Europe to the struggle to abolish slavery and the expansion of the British Empire. Blake was part of a constellation of artists and writers in Europe concerned with renewed spirituality in art and life in the late 1700s. In Germany artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich engaged with similar ideas to Blake and, while they did not know his work, a shared quest to use art to convey their visions of spiritual renewal links these artists.
Blake was friends with Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, who settled in England in 1779, and they shared a radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Fuseli’s Self Portrait (1780s), in black and white chalk on buff paper, is one of the show’s opening works. The melancholic expression, with the artist’s face held in sketchy hands, can be compared with Catherine Blake’s likely posthumous portrait of her husband as a young man, produced around 1830. Made after Blake’s death, it is one of the few surviving artworks by Catherine. Using graphite on paper, she imagines her husband with hair-like flames coming out of his head, the source of his visions.
The poster image for the show, Satan or Head of a Damned Soul (1789-90), Blake after Fuseli, emphasises the connection between the two artists. Engraved and etched on paper, the contorted head with rolling, vacant eyes probably represents a sinner from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Incorporating Fuseli’s dramatic, exaggerated gestures and distorted poses, this contrasts with Blake’s more typical works in which figures seem symbolic rather than life-like. Fuseli’s Seated female figure (1805-10), showing the back view of a nude woman, forcefully tugging her long hair away from her scalp, communicates a sentient, crackling, relatable energy not always so apparent in Blake.
Works underlining the precarious nature of Blake’s livelihood are dotted throughout the show. F[rench] Revolution, engraving for Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793), illustrates a passage from a royalist history and shows royal guards fending off an attack on King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Versailles in 1789, an image Blake would likely have been politically opposed to which he produced as a commercial engraver. Mock draping at the top of the plane and staged expression of the two principal characters, are perhaps giveaways on the artist’s feeling towards the commission. A more disturbing work is Blake’s engravings for J.G. Stedman’s Narratives of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, published in 1796. Although Stedman was not an abolitionist, the text was taken up as an important work in the antislavery movement. Blake’s fifteen engravings were based on Stedman’s own, now lost, illustrations and show women and children being directed by a towering overseer with a stick, and an idealised trio of three naked women representing Europe supported by Africa and America.
The dream-like Song of Los (1795) presents a more familiar image of Blakean imagery, demonstrating his skills as a printer and illustrator. In four (out of eight) plates we see a fantastical conflict between a fading Urizen, representing rationalism, and Los the prophet, poet and artist. We see Los on his knees worshipping a besmirched sun, covered in blotches of blue, black and brown. More charmingly, another plate depicts a sleeping, supine queen and a king clad in red, on a giant lily, surrounded by stars. Los rests from his labours, and shows a renewed, pale- skinned and boyish Los leaning against his hammer, with which he will forge a new glowing sun of the imagination.
By the early 1790s the Book of Revelation had become associated with sympathy for the French Revolution, drawing on its description of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who unleash war, pestilence, famine and death on the world as a prelude to the redemption of the virtuous. Displaying Blake’s Death on a Pale Horse (1800), drawn from the Revelation passage ‘And behold a pale horse: and name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ next to works on paper, with related titles, by Benjamin West and James Gillray, show how embedded Blake was in the concerns of his time. West’s naturalistic depiction captures the carnage and contrasting whiteness of the animals and Gillray draws attention to the foolhardiness of the rider, modelled on Prime Minister William Pitt, while Blake’s rider is a medieval warrior king, held aloft by a fiery, scaly mythological creature, but enveloped at the top of the frame by the arms of a watchful female figure.
Two further treats in Blake’s Universe are the artist’s largest surviving painting An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man (1811) and Caspar David Friedrich’s Seven Sketches in Sepia, The Ages of Man (1826). Friedrich’s seven seasons spanning from sunrise to angels on clouds are almost photographic, and encapsulate ideas of the romantic sublime. Blake’s painting tells the story of creation in Biblical allegory, with the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity standing beneath a soul being carried to heaven, an encapsulation of how William Blake’s Universe illuminates the artist’s work through insight into his times.
William Blake's Universe is showing at The Fitzwilliam Museum until 19th May 2024
The late eighteenth century is having a moment in the sun; at the Royal Academy Entangled Pasts shines a light on the imperialism, political movements, economy and forces of dissent at the time of its foundation in 1768, while in Cambridge the Fitzwilliam Museum is exploring this revolutionary era through William Blake and his European contemporaries.
Blake (1757-1827) expressed his visionary ideas by combining printing, painting and poetry, making a meagre living as an engraver. The world changed drastically in his lifetime, from revolution and war in America and Europe to the struggle to abolish slavery and the expansion of the British Empire. Blake was part of a constellation of artists and writers in Europe concerned with renewed spirituality in art and life in the late 1700s. In Germany artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich engaged with similar ideas to Blake and, while they did not know his work, a shared quest to use art to convey their visions of spiritual renewal links these artists.
Blake was friends with Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, who settled in England in 1779, and they shared a radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Fuseli’s Self Portrait (1780s), in black and white chalk on buff paper, is one of the show’s opening works. The melancholic expression, with the artist’s face held in sketchy hands, can be compared with Catherine Blake’s likely posthumous portrait of her husband as a young man, produced around 1830. Made after Blake’s death, it is one of the few surviving artworks by Catherine. Using graphite on paper, she imagines her husband with hair-like flames coming out of his head, the source of his visions.
The poster image for the show, Satan or Head of a Damned Soul (1789-90), Blake after Fuseli, emphasises the connection between the two artists. Engraved and etched on paper, the contorted head with rolling, vacant eyes probably represents a sinner from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Incorporating Fuseli’s dramatic, exaggerated gestures and distorted poses, this contrasts with Blake’s more typical works in which figures seem symbolic rather than life-like. Fuseli’s Seated female figure (1805-10), showing the back view of a nude woman, forcefully tugging her long hair away from her scalp, communicates a sentient, crackling, relatable energy not always so apparent in Blake.
Works underlining the precarious nature of Blake’s livelihood are dotted throughout the show. F[rench] Revolution, engraving for Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793), illustrates a passage from a royalist history and shows royal guards fending off an attack on King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Versailles in 1789, an image Blake would likely have been politically opposed to which he produced as a commercial engraver. Mock draping at the top of the plane and staged expression of the two principal characters, are perhaps giveaways on the artist’s feeling towards the commission. A more disturbing work is Blake’s engravings for J.G. Stedman’s Narratives of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, published in 1796. Although Stedman was not an abolitionist, the text was taken up as an important work in the antislavery movement. Blake’s fifteen engravings were based on Stedman’s own, now lost, illustrations and show women and children being directed by a towering overseer with a stick, and an idealised trio of three naked women representing Europe supported by Africa and America.
The dream-like Song of Los (1795) presents a more familiar image of Blakean imagery, demonstrating his skills as a printer and illustrator. In four (out of eight) plates we see a fantastical conflict between a fading Urizen, representing rationalism, and Los the prophet, poet and artist. We see Los on his knees worshipping a besmirched sun, covered in blotches of blue, black and brown. More charmingly, another plate depicts a sleeping, supine queen and a king clad in red, on a giant lily, surrounded by stars. Los rests from his labours, and shows a renewed, pale- skinned and boyish Los leaning against his hammer, with which he will forge a new glowing sun of the imagination.
By the early 1790s the Book of Revelation had become associated with sympathy for the French Revolution, drawing on its description of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who unleash war, pestilence, famine and death on the world as a prelude to the redemption of the virtuous. Displaying Blake’s Death on a Pale Horse (1800), drawn from the Revelation passage ‘And behold a pale horse: and name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ next to works on paper, with related titles, by Benjamin West and James Gillray, show how embedded Blake was in the concerns of his time. West’s naturalistic depiction captures the carnage and contrasting whiteness of the animals and Gillray draws attention to the foolhardiness of the rider, modelled on Prime Minister William Pitt, while Blake’s rider is a medieval warrior king, held aloft by a fiery, scaly mythological creature, but enveloped at the top of the frame by the arms of a watchful female figure.
Two further treats in Blake’s Universe are the artist’s largest surviving painting An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man (1811) and Caspar David Friedrich’s Seven Sketches in Sepia, The Ages of Man (1826). Friedrich’s seven seasons spanning from sunrise to angels on clouds are almost photographic, and encapsulate ideas of the romantic sublime. Blake’s painting tells the story of creation in Biblical allegory, with the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity standing beneath a soul being carried to heaven, an encapsulation of how William Blake’s Universe illuminates the artist’s work through insight into his times.
William Blake's Universe is showing at The Fitzwilliam Museum until 19th May 2024
The late eighteenth century is having a moment in the sun; at the Royal Academy Entangled Pasts shines a light on the imperialism, political movements, economy and forces of dissent at the time of its foundation in 1768, while in Cambridge the Fitzwilliam Museum is exploring this revolutionary era through William Blake and his European contemporaries.
Blake (1757-1827) expressed his visionary ideas by combining printing, painting and poetry, making a meagre living as an engraver. The world changed drastically in his lifetime, from revolution and war in America and Europe to the struggle to abolish slavery and the expansion of the British Empire. Blake was part of a constellation of artists and writers in Europe concerned with renewed spirituality in art and life in the late 1700s. In Germany artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich engaged with similar ideas to Blake and, while they did not know his work, a shared quest to use art to convey their visions of spiritual renewal links these artists.
Blake was friends with Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, who settled in England in 1779, and they shared a radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Fuseli’s Self Portrait (1780s), in black and white chalk on buff paper, is one of the show’s opening works. The melancholic expression, with the artist’s face held in sketchy hands, can be compared with Catherine Blake’s likely posthumous portrait of her husband as a young man, produced around 1830. Made after Blake’s death, it is one of the few surviving artworks by Catherine. Using graphite on paper, she imagines her husband with hair-like flames coming out of his head, the source of his visions.
The poster image for the show, Satan or Head of a Damned Soul (1789-90), Blake after Fuseli, emphasises the connection between the two artists. Engraved and etched on paper, the contorted head with rolling, vacant eyes probably represents a sinner from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Incorporating Fuseli’s dramatic, exaggerated gestures and distorted poses, this contrasts with Blake’s more typical works in which figures seem symbolic rather than life-like. Fuseli’s Seated female figure (1805-10), showing the back view of a nude woman, forcefully tugging her long hair away from her scalp, communicates a sentient, crackling, relatable energy not always so apparent in Blake.
Works underlining the precarious nature of Blake’s livelihood are dotted throughout the show. F[rench] Revolution, engraving for Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793), illustrates a passage from a royalist history and shows royal guards fending off an attack on King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Versailles in 1789, an image Blake would likely have been politically opposed to which he produced as a commercial engraver. Mock draping at the top of the plane and staged expression of the two principal characters, are perhaps giveaways on the artist’s feeling towards the commission. A more disturbing work is Blake’s engravings for J.G. Stedman’s Narratives of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, published in 1796. Although Stedman was not an abolitionist, the text was taken up as an important work in the antislavery movement. Blake’s fifteen engravings were based on Stedman’s own, now lost, illustrations and show women and children being directed by a towering overseer with a stick, and an idealised trio of three naked women representing Europe supported by Africa and America.
The dream-like Song of Los (1795) presents a more familiar image of Blakean imagery, demonstrating his skills as a printer and illustrator. In four (out of eight) plates we see a fantastical conflict between a fading Urizen, representing rationalism, and Los the prophet, poet and artist. We see Los on his knees worshipping a besmirched sun, covered in blotches of blue, black and brown. More charmingly, another plate depicts a sleeping, supine queen and a king clad in red, on a giant lily, surrounded by stars. Los rests from his labours, and shows a renewed, pale- skinned and boyish Los leaning against his hammer, with which he will forge a new glowing sun of the imagination.
By the early 1790s the Book of Revelation had become associated with sympathy for the French Revolution, drawing on its description of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who unleash war, pestilence, famine and death on the world as a prelude to the redemption of the virtuous. Displaying Blake’s Death on a Pale Horse (1800), drawn from the Revelation passage ‘And behold a pale horse: and name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ next to works on paper, with related titles, by Benjamin West and James Gillray, show how embedded Blake was in the concerns of his time. West’s naturalistic depiction captures the carnage and contrasting whiteness of the animals and Gillray draws attention to the foolhardiness of the rider, modelled on Prime Minister William Pitt, while Blake’s rider is a medieval warrior king, held aloft by a fiery, scaly mythological creature, but enveloped at the top of the frame by the arms of a watchful female figure.
Two further treats in Blake’s Universe are the artist’s largest surviving painting An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man (1811) and Caspar David Friedrich’s Seven Sketches in Sepia, The Ages of Man (1826). Friedrich’s seven seasons spanning from sunrise to angels on clouds are almost photographic, and encapsulate ideas of the romantic sublime. Blake’s painting tells the story of creation in Biblical allegory, with the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity standing beneath a soul being carried to heaven, an encapsulation of how William Blake’s Universe illuminates the artist’s work through insight into his times.
William Blake's Universe is showing at The Fitzwilliam Museum until 19th May 2024
The late eighteenth century is having a moment in the sun; at the Royal Academy Entangled Pasts shines a light on the imperialism, political movements, economy and forces of dissent at the time of its foundation in 1768, while in Cambridge the Fitzwilliam Museum is exploring this revolutionary era through William Blake and his European contemporaries.
Blake (1757-1827) expressed his visionary ideas by combining printing, painting and poetry, making a meagre living as an engraver. The world changed drastically in his lifetime, from revolution and war in America and Europe to the struggle to abolish slavery and the expansion of the British Empire. Blake was part of a constellation of artists and writers in Europe concerned with renewed spirituality in art and life in the late 1700s. In Germany artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich engaged with similar ideas to Blake and, while they did not know his work, a shared quest to use art to convey their visions of spiritual renewal links these artists.
Blake was friends with Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, who settled in England in 1779, and they shared a radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Fuseli’s Self Portrait (1780s), in black and white chalk on buff paper, is one of the show’s opening works. The melancholic expression, with the artist’s face held in sketchy hands, can be compared with Catherine Blake’s likely posthumous portrait of her husband as a young man, produced around 1830. Made after Blake’s death, it is one of the few surviving artworks by Catherine. Using graphite on paper, she imagines her husband with hair-like flames coming out of his head, the source of his visions.
The poster image for the show, Satan or Head of a Damned Soul (1789-90), Blake after Fuseli, emphasises the connection between the two artists. Engraved and etched on paper, the contorted head with rolling, vacant eyes probably represents a sinner from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Incorporating Fuseli’s dramatic, exaggerated gestures and distorted poses, this contrasts with Blake’s more typical works in which figures seem symbolic rather than life-like. Fuseli’s Seated female figure (1805-10), showing the back view of a nude woman, forcefully tugging her long hair away from her scalp, communicates a sentient, crackling, relatable energy not always so apparent in Blake.
Works underlining the precarious nature of Blake’s livelihood are dotted throughout the show. F[rench] Revolution, engraving for Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793), illustrates a passage from a royalist history and shows royal guards fending off an attack on King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Versailles in 1789, an image Blake would likely have been politically opposed to which he produced as a commercial engraver. Mock draping at the top of the plane and staged expression of the two principal characters, are perhaps giveaways on the artist’s feeling towards the commission. A more disturbing work is Blake’s engravings for J.G. Stedman’s Narratives of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, published in 1796. Although Stedman was not an abolitionist, the text was taken up as an important work in the antislavery movement. Blake’s fifteen engravings were based on Stedman’s own, now lost, illustrations and show women and children being directed by a towering overseer with a stick, and an idealised trio of three naked women representing Europe supported by Africa and America.
The dream-like Song of Los (1795) presents a more familiar image of Blakean imagery, demonstrating his skills as a printer and illustrator. In four (out of eight) plates we see a fantastical conflict between a fading Urizen, representing rationalism, and Los the prophet, poet and artist. We see Los on his knees worshipping a besmirched sun, covered in blotches of blue, black and brown. More charmingly, another plate depicts a sleeping, supine queen and a king clad in red, on a giant lily, surrounded by stars. Los rests from his labours, and shows a renewed, pale- skinned and boyish Los leaning against his hammer, with which he will forge a new glowing sun of the imagination.
By the early 1790s the Book of Revelation had become associated with sympathy for the French Revolution, drawing on its description of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who unleash war, pestilence, famine and death on the world as a prelude to the redemption of the virtuous. Displaying Blake’s Death on a Pale Horse (1800), drawn from the Revelation passage ‘And behold a pale horse: and name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ next to works on paper, with related titles, by Benjamin West and James Gillray, show how embedded Blake was in the concerns of his time. West’s naturalistic depiction captures the carnage and contrasting whiteness of the animals and Gillray draws attention to the foolhardiness of the rider, modelled on Prime Minister William Pitt, while Blake’s rider is a medieval warrior king, held aloft by a fiery, scaly mythological creature, but enveloped at the top of the frame by the arms of a watchful female figure.
Two further treats in Blake’s Universe are the artist’s largest surviving painting An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man (1811) and Caspar David Friedrich’s Seven Sketches in Sepia, The Ages of Man (1826). Friedrich’s seven seasons spanning from sunrise to angels on clouds are almost photographic, and encapsulate ideas of the romantic sublime. Blake’s painting tells the story of creation in Biblical allegory, with the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity standing beneath a soul being carried to heaven, an encapsulation of how William Blake’s Universe illuminates the artist’s work through insight into his times.
William Blake's Universe is showing at The Fitzwilliam Museum until 19th May 2024
The late eighteenth century is having a moment in the sun; at the Royal Academy Entangled Pasts shines a light on the imperialism, political movements, economy and forces of dissent at the time of its foundation in 1768, while in Cambridge the Fitzwilliam Museum is exploring this revolutionary era through William Blake and his European contemporaries.
Blake (1757-1827) expressed his visionary ideas by combining printing, painting and poetry, making a meagre living as an engraver. The world changed drastically in his lifetime, from revolution and war in America and Europe to the struggle to abolish slavery and the expansion of the British Empire. Blake was part of a constellation of artists and writers in Europe concerned with renewed spirituality in art and life in the late 1700s. In Germany artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich engaged with similar ideas to Blake and, while they did not know his work, a shared quest to use art to convey their visions of spiritual renewal links these artists.
Blake was friends with Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, who settled in England in 1779, and they shared a radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Fuseli’s Self Portrait (1780s), in black and white chalk on buff paper, is one of the show’s opening works. The melancholic expression, with the artist’s face held in sketchy hands, can be compared with Catherine Blake’s likely posthumous portrait of her husband as a young man, produced around 1830. Made after Blake’s death, it is one of the few surviving artworks by Catherine. Using graphite on paper, she imagines her husband with hair-like flames coming out of his head, the source of his visions.
The poster image for the show, Satan or Head of a Damned Soul (1789-90), Blake after Fuseli, emphasises the connection between the two artists. Engraved and etched on paper, the contorted head with rolling, vacant eyes probably represents a sinner from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Incorporating Fuseli’s dramatic, exaggerated gestures and distorted poses, this contrasts with Blake’s more typical works in which figures seem symbolic rather than life-like. Fuseli’s Seated female figure (1805-10), showing the back view of a nude woman, forcefully tugging her long hair away from her scalp, communicates a sentient, crackling, relatable energy not always so apparent in Blake.
Works underlining the precarious nature of Blake’s livelihood are dotted throughout the show. F[rench] Revolution, engraving for Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793), illustrates a passage from a royalist history and shows royal guards fending off an attack on King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Versailles in 1789, an image Blake would likely have been politically opposed to which he produced as a commercial engraver. Mock draping at the top of the plane and staged expression of the two principal characters, are perhaps giveaways on the artist’s feeling towards the commission. A more disturbing work is Blake’s engravings for J.G. Stedman’s Narratives of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, published in 1796. Although Stedman was not an abolitionist, the text was taken up as an important work in the antislavery movement. Blake’s fifteen engravings were based on Stedman’s own, now lost, illustrations and show women and children being directed by a towering overseer with a stick, and an idealised trio of three naked women representing Europe supported by Africa and America.
The dream-like Song of Los (1795) presents a more familiar image of Blakean imagery, demonstrating his skills as a printer and illustrator. In four (out of eight) plates we see a fantastical conflict between a fading Urizen, representing rationalism, and Los the prophet, poet and artist. We see Los on his knees worshipping a besmirched sun, covered in blotches of blue, black and brown. More charmingly, another plate depicts a sleeping, supine queen and a king clad in red, on a giant lily, surrounded by stars. Los rests from his labours, and shows a renewed, pale- skinned and boyish Los leaning against his hammer, with which he will forge a new glowing sun of the imagination.
By the early 1790s the Book of Revelation had become associated with sympathy for the French Revolution, drawing on its description of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who unleash war, pestilence, famine and death on the world as a prelude to the redemption of the virtuous. Displaying Blake’s Death on a Pale Horse (1800), drawn from the Revelation passage ‘And behold a pale horse: and name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ next to works on paper, with related titles, by Benjamin West and James Gillray, show how embedded Blake was in the concerns of his time. West’s naturalistic depiction captures the carnage and contrasting whiteness of the animals and Gillray draws attention to the foolhardiness of the rider, modelled on Prime Minister William Pitt, while Blake’s rider is a medieval warrior king, held aloft by a fiery, scaly mythological creature, but enveloped at the top of the frame by the arms of a watchful female figure.
Two further treats in Blake’s Universe are the artist’s largest surviving painting An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man (1811) and Caspar David Friedrich’s Seven Sketches in Sepia, The Ages of Man (1826). Friedrich’s seven seasons spanning from sunrise to angels on clouds are almost photographic, and encapsulate ideas of the romantic sublime. Blake’s painting tells the story of creation in Biblical allegory, with the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity standing beneath a soul being carried to heaven, an encapsulation of how William Blake’s Universe illuminates the artist’s work through insight into his times.
William Blake's Universe is showing at The Fitzwilliam Museum until 19th May 2024
The late eighteenth century is having a moment in the sun; at the Royal Academy Entangled Pasts shines a light on the imperialism, political movements, economy and forces of dissent at the time of its foundation in 1768, while in Cambridge the Fitzwilliam Museum is exploring this revolutionary era through William Blake and his European contemporaries.
Blake (1757-1827) expressed his visionary ideas by combining printing, painting and poetry, making a meagre living as an engraver. The world changed drastically in his lifetime, from revolution and war in America and Europe to the struggle to abolish slavery and the expansion of the British Empire. Blake was part of a constellation of artists and writers in Europe concerned with renewed spirituality in art and life in the late 1700s. In Germany artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich engaged with similar ideas to Blake and, while they did not know his work, a shared quest to use art to convey their visions of spiritual renewal links these artists.
Blake was friends with Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, who settled in England in 1779, and they shared a radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Fuseli’s Self Portrait (1780s), in black and white chalk on buff paper, is one of the show’s opening works. The melancholic expression, with the artist’s face held in sketchy hands, can be compared with Catherine Blake’s likely posthumous portrait of her husband as a young man, produced around 1830. Made after Blake’s death, it is one of the few surviving artworks by Catherine. Using graphite on paper, she imagines her husband with hair-like flames coming out of his head, the source of his visions.
The poster image for the show, Satan or Head of a Damned Soul (1789-90), Blake after Fuseli, emphasises the connection between the two artists. Engraved and etched on paper, the contorted head with rolling, vacant eyes probably represents a sinner from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Incorporating Fuseli’s dramatic, exaggerated gestures and distorted poses, this contrasts with Blake’s more typical works in which figures seem symbolic rather than life-like. Fuseli’s Seated female figure (1805-10), showing the back view of a nude woman, forcefully tugging her long hair away from her scalp, communicates a sentient, crackling, relatable energy not always so apparent in Blake.
Works underlining the precarious nature of Blake’s livelihood are dotted throughout the show. F[rench] Revolution, engraving for Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine (1793), illustrates a passage from a royalist history and shows royal guards fending off an attack on King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Versailles in 1789, an image Blake would likely have been politically opposed to which he produced as a commercial engraver. Mock draping at the top of the plane and staged expression of the two principal characters, are perhaps giveaways on the artist’s feeling towards the commission. A more disturbing work is Blake’s engravings for J.G. Stedman’s Narratives of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, published in 1796. Although Stedman was not an abolitionist, the text was taken up as an important work in the antislavery movement. Blake’s fifteen engravings were based on Stedman’s own, now lost, illustrations and show women and children being directed by a towering overseer with a stick, and an idealised trio of three naked women representing Europe supported by Africa and America.
The dream-like Song of Los (1795) presents a more familiar image of Blakean imagery, demonstrating his skills as a printer and illustrator. In four (out of eight) plates we see a fantastical conflict between a fading Urizen, representing rationalism, and Los the prophet, poet and artist. We see Los on his knees worshipping a besmirched sun, covered in blotches of blue, black and brown. More charmingly, another plate depicts a sleeping, supine queen and a king clad in red, on a giant lily, surrounded by stars. Los rests from his labours, and shows a renewed, pale- skinned and boyish Los leaning against his hammer, with which he will forge a new glowing sun of the imagination.
By the early 1790s the Book of Revelation had become associated with sympathy for the French Revolution, drawing on its description of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who unleash war, pestilence, famine and death on the world as a prelude to the redemption of the virtuous. Displaying Blake’s Death on a Pale Horse (1800), drawn from the Revelation passage ‘And behold a pale horse: and name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ next to works on paper, with related titles, by Benjamin West and James Gillray, show how embedded Blake was in the concerns of his time. West’s naturalistic depiction captures the carnage and contrasting whiteness of the animals and Gillray draws attention to the foolhardiness of the rider, modelled on Prime Minister William Pitt, while Blake’s rider is a medieval warrior king, held aloft by a fiery, scaly mythological creature, but enveloped at the top of the frame by the arms of a watchful female figure.
Two further treats in Blake’s Universe are the artist’s largest surviving painting An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man (1811) and Caspar David Friedrich’s Seven Sketches in Sepia, The Ages of Man (1826). Friedrich’s seven seasons spanning from sunrise to angels on clouds are almost photographic, and encapsulate ideas of the romantic sublime. Blake’s painting tells the story of creation in Biblical allegory, with the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity standing beneath a soul being carried to heaven, an encapsulation of how William Blake’s Universe illuminates the artist’s work through insight into his times.
William Blake's Universe is showing at The Fitzwilliam Museum until 19th May 2024
