Birth Year : 1757
Death Year : 1827
Country : United Kingdom
William Blake, poet, engraver, painter, and mystic, was born
and lived almost his entire life in London. He was apprenticed to an engraver
at the age of fourteen and began to write and publish his own books when
he was twenty-six. His most famous book of poems, "Songs of Innocence",
appeared in 1789. It was written, printed, engraved, and bound by the artist
himself, with the aid of his wife. Although Blake never left England, he
studied the work of Michelangelo
and the Italian Mannerists from a large collection of engravings, and he
was one of several artists influenced by John
Henry Fuseli, an Anglo-Swiss painter who worshiped Shakespeare and
Michelangelo,. Blake, for his
part, was devoted to the Bible, to Dante, and to Milton. He also admired
the medieval period and conceived of his own books as eighteenth-century
successors to the illuminated manuscripts of the medieval monks.
His
work is religious or mystical in expression and romantic in spirit. It
is full of movement, flickering or glaring light, medieval symbols, and
mannerist musculature and arrangement. Blake was noted for his scrupulous
honesty and resisted all offers of patronage by the rich, preferring to
work in poverty and independence. He was comparatively unknown in England
until 1818, when one of his disciples, John Linnell, organized a group
who bought Blake's drawings and helped secure commissions for The Book
of Job and The Devine Comedy. Blake died before the latter was completed,
having engraved only seven of the one hundred watercolors he had made for
the book.
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William
Blake
Beatrice
Addressing Dante
William
Blake
Ancient
of Days
William
Blake
The
Angels Hovering Over the Body of Jesus in the Sepulchre
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