William Blake

An innovative English artist, one of the first representatives of Romanticism, who was unknown during his lifetime but had a great influence on the development of European avant-garde art. William Blake is better known to the general public as a poet, whose works reflected original philosophical views, but the images of the master’s paintings and graphic works are not less deep and bright.

In his works, Blake created his universe, inhabited by gods, mythical creatures and biblical characters. Even in his youth, the artist moved away from the academic canons in painting and advocated freedom of expression without any restrictions on creativity. These ideas, which were realized in the fine arts only at the end of the 19th century, seemed to his contemporaries absurd and almost crazy. But William Blake worked tirelessly, not paying any attention to rejection and criticism. He created amazingly deep and expressive engravings for the divine comedy of Dante and the Bible, as well as numerous illustrations for his own works.

Surrounded by only a small group of followers, the artist and poet died in obscurity and extreme poverty. It was only after his death that people started talking about Blake’s extraordinary talent in England and later around the world. Outstanding nineteenth-century writer William Rossetti, one of the founders of the Brotherhood of the Pre-Raphaelites, called him the “glorious luminary”. He said of William Blake, “He is a man neither anticipated by his predecessors, nor classified by his contemporaries, nor replaced by known or alleged successors”.

Key ideas:

– The artist’s works are complex, versatile and inconsistent. They demonstrate the artist’s craving for mythology and symbolism, where each image, in addition to the obvious, carries a few more secret meanings. Blake interpreted well-known motives and characters of heroes extraordinarily, and the plots have several different, sometimes conflicting interpretations.

– Being an opponent of the church and the restrictions that it imposes on the human mind, Blake saturated his works with religious images and created a series of engravings illustrating the Bible. According to the artist, his work was based on visions that he had from childhood and which were religious.

– The central image of the paintings and graphics of William Blake was always a man. Unlike his contemporaries depicting portraits and landscapes, the artist concentrated on the human body, which is his expression of emotions, the internal state of a man and his soul. The heroes of the artist’s works are physically healthy, muscular people, but their bodies are so flexible and plastic that they do not look like real people but resemble mythical and biblical heroes.

– Blake was an opponent of industrialization, the domination of science and reason over human feelings. He believed that modern society limits a person too much, while the basis of each personality is unlimited imagination and inspiration. He expressed his disagreement with the existing order in his works, saturated with subtle hints and allegories.

– The uniqueness of the art of William Blake lies in the fact that he combined his literary and artistic works into a single whole. By illustrating his works, the artist not only conveyed their plot but also emphasized the emotional component and sometimes added new shades of meaning to the written text.

– William Blake was an innovator not only in the plots and images of his paintings. He used original graphic techniques, one of which became known as the “Luminous Engraving of Blake” or relief engraving. Its main difference was that the colour was applied to the drawing after the print on paper. This method allowed to spend less time on the creation of volumetric material and was widely used to create small circulations of illustrated books.