| Visions fired the imagination of eccentric artist Blake The 18th century misfit was regarded as a madman for his claims of divine inspiration. The Associated Press LONDON - Religious visionary, political radical, poet and painter, Willian Blake was an 18th century misfit who found immortality in a series of illuminated books of poetry. Brightly colored pages of these hand-printed books, ignored by the public in his lifetime but now treasured by museums around the world, are on display at the Tate Britain gallery through Feb. 11 in the most comprehensive Blake exhibition ever assembled. One of the few large paintings in the show is not by Blake, but of him - an 1807 portrait by Thomas Phillips. The gray-haired poet with pugnicious jaw and broad, shining brow is depicted gazing up where the ceiling would be. But as he is William Blake, we should know he isn't inspecting the cornices; he must be in rapt communication with the angels and biblical prophets whose regualr visits inspired his poetry and painting. Blake was by any measure, eccentric. Today, even his admirers might struggle for a politically correct way to desrcibe him. In his own day, many regarded him simply as mad. And although some others artists and a few patrons recognized genius in him, he was generally disregarded. The more "orthodox philosophers" of the time "tended to equate any form of religious enthusiasm with mental derangement; to claim divine inspiration, as Blake often did, was to be almost automatically labeled insane," Peter Ackroyd wrote in his 1995 biography, "Blake." From Blake's first sighting of angels clustered in a tree when he was a smal boy, until he sang of the sights of heaven with his dying breaths at age 79, Blake's visions fired his imagination. He believed man's imagination was supreme and he painted always from his mind, not from nature. Blake made a meager living as as engraver. He had little success with his own work, which he printed, painted and bound at his home in London with the help of his wife, right up until his death. He had developed a means of "relief engraving" that allowed him to etch both the drawing and the handwritten poem on a single plate, reducing his costs and at the same time increasing the impact of his work. Words and images, lyric poetry and rhythmic line drawings are inseparable, tied together with his handwriting on the printed page. Among them are some of the most famous lines of English poetry - "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright," and its opposite, "Little lamb, who made thee?" from "Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience." His poetic hopes for "England's green and pleasant land," set to music in 1916 as the hymn "Jerusalem" have become a Sunday staple of the Church of England and a kind of unofficial English anthem. Yet Willian Blake lived and died a determined Dissenter - one who parted ways with the established church. Blake was born in 1757, the son of a London tradesman - a hosiery maker - and was brought up on the Bible. He was self-educated except for his studies at art school, where his father sent him untl he was 15, and apprenticed to an engraver. It was the start of a long, hard life at the press and the copper plate. In addition to his own work, he produced illustrations for the work of others, including editions of Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Dante's "Inferno." It isn't difficult to understand why contemporaries thought Blake mad. His was an unconventional Christianity and produced some fearful images, along with those of grace and beauty. His tempera painting, "The Ghost of a Flea," a quasi-human form with taloned hands and misshaped head, is at least as frightening as the horrors created by today's special effects. Nor was Blake's Christianity prudish. Some of his drawings are explicity erotic. In one famous incident, Thomas Butts, a patron of Blake, arrived at the poet's modest house and found Blake and his wife sitting naked in the summer house in their own south London Garden of Eden, reciting passages from "Paradise Lost." "Come in!" Blake reportedly cried, "It's only Adam and Eve, you know!" Blake, apparently a mild and gentle man by nature, was adamant about his own religious, social and political beliefs. He spent all but three years of his life in London where filth, poverty and human desperation lived just downwind of grandeur and the burgeoning wealth of newly mechanized industry. Blake's sympathies were with the oppressed. At a time of revolution in America and in France, he was a republican opposed to monarchy. His trial - and acquittal - on sedition charges after he was accused of damning the king did not change his mind. He was wary of science and fundamentally opposed to the economic and social tenets that underpinned the Industrial Revolution. All these opinions made for rejection and disappointment. But he found joy in his spiritual life, had enthusiastic patrons and a loving, 45-year marriage. Blake was a poor man when he died Aug. 12, 1827. His wife, Catherine, borrowed the money for his modest funeral and he was buried in a common grave in London. "Blake continutes to speak to successive generations, to anyone who believes in the power of the imagination," wrote the Guardian's critic, Jonathan Glancey, "He is one of Britain's greats, not just as a poet or an artist, but as a true origianl, a spirit of the unfettered imagination." |
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