Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

Another possible self-portrait is altogether uncanny (figure 8). Toward the end of his life Blake began to draw “visionary heads” of historical characters for a painter, astrologer, and phrenologist named John Varley, who was convinced that Blake enjoyed direct contact with the spirit world. Linnell inscribed this picture “The Portrait of a Man who instructed Mr. Blake in Painting etc. in his Dreams.” The unwavering gaze of the enormous eyes is filled with calm expectation, like that of a being from another universe, and the slight smile might make one think of a bodhisattva. As for the mysterious branching shape on the forehead, it has been variously identified as flames of inspiration, as the tree of knowledge, and as the bulges from which phrenologists claimed to deduce specific mental faculties. Many commentators have thought that this is indeed an idealized avatar of Blake himself, and Gilchrist’s description of Blake’s appearance can easily be applied to it: “There was great volume of brain in that square, massive head, that piled-up brow, very full and rounded at the temples, where, according to phrenologists, ideality or imagination resides.”27

  7. Probable self-portrait by Blake

  8. The Man Who Taught Blake Painting

  Inventing a New Way of Etching

  The process of etching, as opposed to engraving, was valued by printmakers because it was much simpler than the laborious incision of lines into metal. The copper plate would be coated with a layer of wax and the design drawn into it with a needle. Next, the plate was bathed in a weak solution of nitric acid, held in place by a wax dike around the edges. The acid would bite into the metal wherever the needle had cut into the wax, leaving unchanged the areas still protected by wax. The length of time during which the plate was bathed in acid would determine how deeply the lines were bitten.

  It needs to be emphasized that in Blake’s day engraving and etching were regarded not as mutually exclusive art forms but simply as practical techniques to be used in whatever way would facilitate reproduction. Often both were employed in a single image, engraved lines adding detail to an initial etching. Many works that are now described as etchings in fact contain a good deal of engraving, and many so-called engravings were almost entirely etched.28 Blake often combined the two techniques, and used pen and ink as well to emphasize lines on individual printed copies.

  In his early thirties, Blake adopted a method of etching that was the reverse of the normal process. He believed that it was his own invention—inspired, he said, by the spirit of his dead brother, Robert—and although researchers have located some predecessors, the process was certainly unfamiliar to London printmakers at the time. Instead of drawing lines into the wax-coated surface of the plate, Blake raised his outlines above the surface, in what is known as relief etching. He would draw the design directly onto the bare copper using a quill or brush dipped in an acid-resistant varnish. The plate would then be bathed in acid, which would eat away everything except the drawing, so that the design would stand out from the plate. This practice allowed a freedom of execution that was very like freehand drawing. “Painting is drawing on canvas,” Blake said, “and engraving is drawing on copper.” The resulting images, the scholar-printmaker Joseph Viscomi says, have the freshness of original compositions, “free of the visual distortion that characteristically occurs when one set of codes is translated into another.”29

  But if execution was freer in this respect, in another it was more demanding. In normal etching, ink is applied with a roller to the entire plate, which is then wiped clean. When paper is afterward forced down on the plate in a press, it picks up the ink that remains in the etched grooves. In Blake’s procedure, however, ink had to be dabbed very gently onto the raised lines with a leather printer’s ball. Whenever ink got on parts of the plate where it wasn’t wanted, as would often happen, it had to be carefully wiped off.

  Ordinary illustrated books, such as Night Thoughts, combined conventionally printed typeface with a pictorial border. Blake’s novel practice allowed him to combine words and images in a single design. When he inscribed his text, the lettering of course needed to be written backwards, in order to appear correctly when printed. He learned to do that fluently; his friend Cumberland said that “he alone excels in that art.”30

  Relief etching gave Blake complete control of the entire process from start to finish, and that was one of the chief reasons he adopted it. In commercial publishing a series of individuals were involved in making each page of an illustrated book: the writer, the compositor who set the text in type, the designer of the images, the engraver who reproduced the designs on the plates, and finally the printer who would pass each page twice through the press, once for text (in raised type) and once for images (incised into the metal). For expensive editions—Audubon’s are a familiar example—still another specialist would color the images. Blake acted as sole writer, designer, engraver, printer, and colorist.

  At various times Blake insinuated sly references to the way he created his books. This is how he introduced the startling Proverbs of Hell in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

  When I came home, on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock. With corroding fires he wrote the following sentence, now perceived by the minds of men and read by them on earth:

  How do you know but ev’ry bird that cuts the airy way

  Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?

  The “mighty Devil” is Blake himself, seeing his own reflection in the bath of acid on the plate. Corrosives, he adds, “in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”31 Long afterward, this passage would take on a new life in the mid-twentieth-century counterculture. Describing experiences with mescaline, Aldous Huxley entitled his book The Doors of Perception, and from either Huxley or Blake Jim Morrison got the name of the Doors.

  Blake etched hundreds of copper plates during his life, sometimes on both sides since copper was expensive. These he kept for reprinting when new customers would appear, but after his death they were apparently melted down for reuse. One single fragment has survived. Now at the Library of Congress, it is the broken-off corner of a plate originally intended for the 1793 poem America: A Prophecy (figure 9). After deciding for some unknown reason not to use this plate (the gouges at the right are not thought to have been made by him), Blake cut it up and gave this piece to the son of a friend, who kept it in a cabinet, where it was eventually rediscovered in 1937. To save expense the plates were thin and therefore had to be etched very shallowly. On this one he stopped the acid from biting when it reached a depth of .005 inches (0.12 mm)—less than the thickness of a postcard.32

  As is apparent in a print made from the now-lost complete plate (figure 10), Blake’s script is more like calligraphy than like conventional typeface. He himself referred to “illuminating the manuscript,” by analogy with medieval manuscripts he had seen, and he would have appreciated E. H. Gombrich’s comment, “The Egyptians had largely drawn what they knew to exist, the Greeks what they saw; in the Middle Ages the artist also learned to express in his picture what he felt.”33

  The huge word “prophecy” swirls with vitality, vines and tendrils sprouting from the letters. In many of Blake’s plates, what would otherwise be blank spaces in the text swarm with living forms—tiny people, birds in flight, leafy growths. Their practical function may have been to ensure that the lines to be printed were not spaced too far apart, but they also serve as a constant reminder of the difference between Blake’s handmade lettering and an ordinary printed text.

  The words italicized below are the ones that can still be seen on the fragment:

  The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent;

  Sullen fires across the Atlantic glow to America’s shore:

  Piercing the souls of warlike men, who rise in silent
night,

  Washington, Franklin, Paine & Warren, Gates, Franklin, & Green;

  Meet on the coast glowing with blood from Albions fiery Prince.

  When Blake reengraved this plate he altered the fourth line slightly, so that in the final version it ends “Gates, Hancock & Green.”34

  How Blake Made His Prints

  Though never well to do, Blake owned a press, which he and another former apprentice, James Parker, had acquired when they briefly managed a print shop together. When they parted ways, amicably it seems, Parker kept the shop and its stock of prints, and Blake kept the press. Whenever he and Catherine moved, which they did several times, the press went with them. That was no simple matter since it stood five feet high and weighed seven hundred pounds. It could be disassembled for transport, but only with the help of four strong men.35

  This impressive device (figure 11) was called a rolling press, to distinguish it from the kind in which pressure is applied from above by a screw mechanism. Considerable strength was needed to turn the big “star wheel” that the printer is grasping with both hands, pushing hard with his foot as well. The inked plate lies face up on the flat bed R, with a dampened sheet of paper on top of it, protected by thin layers of cloth. After the upper wooden roller (I) has been lowered so as to apply moderate pressure, the bed is moved smoothly along between rollers I and H; the star wheel that the printer is turning is connected to the upper roller, which is joined by cogwheels to the lower. Near the ceiling, previously printed sheets can be seen hanging up to dry.36

  9. Fragment of etched plate by Blake

  10. America: A Prophecy, copy E, plate 3

  Like other artists, Blake preferred high-quality “Whatman paper,” a considerable expense, since it was handmade from cotton or rags. As is never apparent in reproductions of his plates, which show only the images themselves, the size of the printed sheets can vary greatly in the multiple copies that exist. In copy Z of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, seven plates from which are reproduced in this book, the images average three inches by four in size, while the pages that contain them are nearly twice as large.

  11. A rolling press

  Once the sheets were dry, the final step was to apply watercolors and to touch up with ink any lines that had failed to print well. Frederick Tatham, who knew the Blakes well in later life, said that Catherine had “an excellent idea of colouring” and that she worked on the images “to a much greater extent than is usually credited.” Like other artists at the time, the Blakes ground and mixed their watercolors from powder. Their preferred colors were Prussian blue, gamboge (from the French name for Cambodia—the color in Buddhist monks’ saffron robes), yellow ocher, Indian red, various umbers, black, vermilion, rose madder, raw sienna, and alizarin crimson.37

  From start to finish, this was extremely time-consuming work. Two or at most three sheets, progressively lighter in appearance, could be printed from a single inking. It would then be necessary to wipe the plate clean and ink it all over again. Michael Phillips, after much practical experimentation, estimates that it took three to four hours to print ten impressions and a full week to print ten complete copies of the eighteen-plate poem America. His conclusion has more than practical interest: “The length of time taken to build up an even and sufficiently dense layer of ink on the often tiny network of relief on the facsimile plates came as a genuine surprise [to me]; but it seems perfectly in accord with Blake’s character and creative aspiration that the arduousness of the process was of little concern to him.”38

  Blake valued profoundly the uniqueness of each copy produced in this way. In conventional printmaking the goal was a completely standardized product. A few years after Blake’s death, the efficiency expert Charles Babbage cited copper engraving as an example of perfect reproduction: “The impressions from the same copperplate have a similarity which no labour could produce by hand. The minutest traces are transferred to all the impressions, and no omission can arise from the inattention or unskillfulness of the operator.”39 That was exactly what Blake disliked.

  To be sure, when Blake produced multiple copies of a work from a single printing session, they would resemble one another closely, but even then there was variation in coloring; copies from different periods of his career often vary drastically. And even when the copies are similar, they have a forceful energy very different from the pedantic accuracy of standardized illustration. A modern expert on prints observes, “The more complex and artificial the technique of a print, especially in the way its lines are laid, the more certain one may be that its maker was a craftsman translator and not a creative artist.”40

  Blake hoped that his unique process would enable him to produce his works cheaply, bypassing publishing-house middlemen in order to reach a wide audience. The opposite happened. Not only was the process laborious, but a reading public eager for conventional books would have been baffled by his, if they had ever seen them. Blake’s books were apparently seldom on view in shops or advertised in catalogs. Nearly all the copies that were ever bought were probably sold by Blake himself from his house.

  Between 1789 and 1795 Blake made approximately £40 from 125 copies of his works in illuminated printing, as contrasted with more than £500 from plates he engraved for commercial booksellers. Not counting the investment of his time and labor, he would have needed to sell at least a dozen copies of each book just to recover the cost of copper, paper, and other materials. If he did sometimes turn a profit, it was never much.41

  Outline and Ideal Forms

  Blake had a fierce belief in his individuality of vision that struck some people as pigheaded, and he soon developed the style that we recognize as Blakean. But for many years, as he later acknowledged, he found it hard to free himself from the influence of earlier painters, which was “like walking in another man’s style, or speaking or looking in another man’s style and manner, unappropriate and repugnant to your own individual character.” Rubens, he said, “is a most outrageous demon, and by infusing the remembrances of his pictures, and style of execution, hinders all power of individual thought.” The meaning is explained by Morris Eaves: “Demons (in their New Testament form) are external forces that take up internal residence—a kind of mental parasite that causes the host to be unlike itself.”42

  This is not to say that Blake’s style was totally unique. His close friend John Flaxman, who designed some Wedgwood catalog illustrations that Blake engraved, was a leading figure in what has been called romantic classicism, or alternatively the international linear style. This featured heroic figures drawn from classical sculptures, Greek vase paintings, and Michelangelo’s frescoes; they were usually nude or wearing clinging draperies, and placed in timeless, nonillusionistic settings.43

  Another friend, George Cumberland, published a book called Thoughts on Outline in which he said that outline should be like “a wire that surrounds the design,” and should always be “fine, firm, flowing and faint.” Blake would agree with all of that—except for “faint.” He even asserted that clarity of outline had a moral dimension: “What is it that distinguishes honesty from knavery, but the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty in the actions and intentions? Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again.”44

  Blake disliked the engraving techniques that produced the illusion of three dimensions, which he regarded as a slavish imitation of nature instead of a vision of its inner meaning, and he despised equivalent effects even in painting. One writer described Correggio’s style as “passing by almost imperceptible degrees through pellucid demi-tints and warm reflections into broad, deep, and transparent shade,” producing “the greatest possible effect with the sweetest and softest repose imaginable.” In Blake’s opinion it was disastrous for an artist to succumb to Correggio’s “soft and even tints without boundaries.” A comment by Gombrich on Correggio is especially helpful here, relating his technique to “Leonardo’s famous invention which the Italians call sfumato—the blurred outli
ne and mellowed colours that allow one form to merge with another and always leave something to our imagination.” Blake too wanted to inspire the viewer’s imagination, but with distinct outlines, not sfumato.45

  On Rubens, Blake was downright abusive: “To my eye Rubens’s colouring is most contemptible. His shadows are of a filthy brown, somewhat of the colour of excrement; these are filled with tints and messes of yellow and red. His lights are all the colours of the rainbow, laid on indiscriminately and broken one into another.” The Venetian school was just as bad: “The Venetian and Flemish practice is broken lines, broken masses, and broken colours. Mr. Blake’s [that is, his own] practice is unbroken lines, unbroken masses, and unbroken colours. Their art is to lose form, his art is to find form, and to keep it.”46

  Blake seldom used oils, preferring tempera or watercolor, and in either medium he usually emphasized outline (a set of superb color prints in the mid-1790s are a major exception). Most watercolorists at the time used washes to make tints blend into each other, as in the evocative landscapes that were immensely popular. Blake never painted landscapes, except as sketchy backgrounds for human figures, and his outlines were drawn carefully with ink before being filled in with colors.

  It may be surprising to learn that Blake insisted on “minute particulars,” since his artistic style is heavily stylized and nonnaturalistic; he writes in Jerusalem that the Divine Humanity “protects minute particulars, every one in their own identity.” An important statement explains what that means:

  General knowledge is remote knowledge; it is in particulars that wisdom consists, and happiness too. Both in art and in life, general masses are as much art as a pasteboard man is human. Every man has eyes, nose, and mouth; this every idiot knows. But he who enters into and discriminates most minutely the manners and intentions, the characters in all their branches, is the alone wise or sensible man, and on this discrimination all art is founded. I entreat then that the spectator will attend to the hands and feet, to the lineaments of the countenances. They are all descriptive of character, and not a line is drawn without intention, and that most discriminate and particular. As poetry admits not a letter that is insignificant, so painting admits not a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant, much less an insignificant blur or mark.