William Blake Seen In My Visions A Descriptive Catalogue Of Pictures

In 1809 the little-known artist William Blake held an exhibition of 16 paintings in a private house in Soho in the west end of London. Works inspired by Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and John Milton's "Paradise Lost" sat alongside biblical scenes and Arthurian legend. The exhibition was not a success; the only review in the press was extremely unfavourable and few of the public came. One of those who did was the poet Charles Lamb, who later described the pictures as 'hard, dry, yet with grace', and the catalogue that accompanied the show as 'mystical and full of vision'. It is this catalogue that Tate Publishing are once again making available. In it, the scale and range of Blake's ambition are made plain, along with his theories on painting, his unsparing critiques of other artists and some extraordinary insights into the working of his mind. The only detailed writing on art that remains to us by Blake, it throws light on all his subsequent artistic enterprises, including the illuminated books for which he is perhaps most famous. Part commentary and part manifesto, his catalogue is as radical as it is in places eccentric (he claims at one point to have been transported in a "vision" back to the classical world). Fully illustrated in colour with reproductions of surviving works originally in the exhibition, the book includes an illuminating essay by leading authority on British art Martin Myrone, Lead Curator of Pre-1800 Art at Tate Britain, making it an essential purchase for all of those wanting to know more.

Explores a vital aspect of British Romanticism, the role of illustration in Romantic-era literary texts and visual culture.

Although relatively obscure during his lifetime, William Blake has become one of the most popular English artists and writers, through poems such as “The Tyger” and “Jerusalem,” and images including The Ancient of Days. Less well-known is Blake’s radical religious and political temperament and that his visionary art was created to express a personal mythology that sought to recreate an entirely new approach to philosophy and art. This book examines both Blake’s visual and poetic work over his long career, from early engravings and poems to his final illustrations to Dante and the Book of Job. Divine Images further explores Blake’s immense popular appeal and influence after his death, offering an inspirational look at a pioneering figure.

"Five of the sixteen pictures exhibited have been lost; but among those that remain are The Spiritual Form of Nelson guiding Leviathan, The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth, and The Canterbury Pilgrims, from Chaucer. Blake's text for the catalogue is both commentary and manifesto, throwing light not just on the pictures but also on the illuminated books."--BOOK JACKET.

This monograph reorients discussion of Blake’s prophetic mode, revealing it to be not a system in any formal sense, but a dynamic, human response to an era of momentous historical change when the future Blake had foreseen and the reality he was faced with could not be reconciled. At every stage, Blake’s writing confronts the central problem of all politically minded literature: how texts can become action. Yet he presents us with no single or, indeed, conclusive answer to this question and in this sense it can be said that he fails. Blake, however, never stopped searching for a way that prophecy might be made to live up to its promise in the present. The twentieth-century hermeneuticist Paul Ricoeur shared with Blake a preoccupation with the relationship between time, text and action. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics thus provide a fresh theoretical framework through which to analyse Blake’s attempts to fulfil his prophetic purpose.

Blake in Our Time explores the work of British poet and artist William Blake in the context of the material culture of his era. In the 1960s, University of Toronto scholar G.E. Bentley, Jr almost singlehandedly shifted the focus of Blake criticism from formalism and symbolism to the materiality that contextualizes Blake's work. Following in the footsteps of Bentley's pioneering scholarship, this collection, richly illustrated, demonstrates that the locus of Blake's work lies in the elements that are historically particular to his place and time. Topics include the impact of the town of Chichester on Blake's imagination, the material processes of Blake's painting, the detection of a Blake forgery, and new biographical materials, using archives and online resources, on Blake's contemporaries, patrons, peers, and friends. Essays on the importance of Blake collections world-wide, on variant printings, and on the heirs of Blake in British painting extend the focus of this remarkable investigation to include chalcography and book history.