William Blake: Seen in My Visions: A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures E-Book

William Blake

• Herausgeber: Tate Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Artist's Writings
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 147

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Seen in My Visions

A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures

William Blake

Edited by Martin Myrone

Tate Publishing

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction Martin Myrone

Bibliographic Note

A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures

Illustrations of Surviving Works

Glossarial Index of Art Terms

Biographical Index

Photographic Credits

Copyright

Introduction

The grand Style of Art restored

Martin Myrone

From the middle of May 1809, and for perhaps more than a year afterwards, London’s art lovers had the opportunity to visit a one-man exhibition bringing together ‘Poetical and Historical Inventions’ by the engraver, poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827). The show was held in the upstairs rooms of his brother’s hosiery shop in Broad Street, Golden Square in Soho – the house that Blake had grown up in (fig.1). Inside were sixteen paintings described, or at least discussed, in a lengthy printed catalogue written by Blake himself, the text of which is given in full in the present volume. The exhibition had been advertised by a printed flyer announcing ‘Exhibition of Paintings in Fresco, Poetical and Historical Inventions, by Wm. Blake’ at ‘No.28, Corner of Broad Street, Golden-Square’, with an admittance fee of 2s. 6d., which included the cost of the catalogue. The catalogue itself, titled A Descriptive Catalogue, was advertised in a printed note that Blake must have sent to friends and associates. This proposed, rather more fully, that the exhibition represented ‘The grand Style of Art restored; in FRESCO, or Water-colour Painting, and England protected from the too just imputation of being the Seat and Protectoress of bad (that is blotting and blurring) Art’. Blake’s exhibition, it was claimed, presented ‘real Art, as it was left us by Raphael and AlbertDurer,MichaelAngelo, and JulioRomano’.1

These were grand claims, invoking the most highly esteemed artists of the past as points of direct comparison for Blake’s paintings. The exhibition, in these brief advertisements and in the lengthy text of the Descriptive Catalogue, was proposed as not merely a celebration of an artist’s work, a straightforward retrospective view of a career, but an agenda-setting, forcefully polemical intervention into the art world, and an enterprise aimed at reforming not only the tastes of the public, but their morality as well, through the revival of the ‘grand Style’ in art.

Fig.1 Numbers 27 and 28, Broad Street, Golden Square, London. Number 28 is the house on the left. c.1910

Today, William Blake enjoys an extraordinary reputation as a poet and artist. He is widely regarded as the most radical and original artist of his time, perhaps of all time, an inspiration to poets and creative people of all kinds ever since, widely published and discussed, exhibited and celebrated. When, in 2002, the BBC ran a national poll to find the top 100 ‘Great Britons’, Blake appeared at no.37 and was the only visual artist to feature on the list.

Yet what was his reputation in 1809? It has to be noted from the outset that the exhibition was not, by almost any measure, a success. There was only a single published review at the time, and this was harshly critical; the sparse evidence there is about attendance at the exhibition suggests that it was very poorly attended. That there were visitors to the show as late as June 1810 indicates not that the exhibition had been a triumph, but rather, perhaps, that it had been such a flop – painfully so, for Blake and his friends – that he had not the heart to take it down.

During the course of the extended run of the exhibition, in November 1809, William Blake had his fifty-second birthday. He had been working as an artist since his teenage years with, it is fair to say, mixed results. He had attended the Royal Academy’s drawing schools in 1779 while in his early twenties, part of a fresh generation of artists inspired by the successes of artists like Benjamin West (1738-1820) and Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) in the 1760s, and the foundation of the new Academy itself in 1768, to pursue the cause of ‘high art’ (the Grand Style evoked in the advertisement for the 1809 show). Where earlier generations of British artists could only expect the drudgery of portraiture or descriptive landscape paintings, given the infamous lack of interest of Britons in the visual arts, here at last there seemed to be the chance to emulate the greatest artists of the past, and paint great schemes on noble themes. The reality, for Blake and almost every other artist of the time, was rather more prosaic. He served an apprenticeship under the engraver James Basire (1730-1802), which provided the solid technical skills to serve him in his career as a reproductive printmaker – the basic source of his income throughout his life. His greater aspirations as a painter found expression through a few exhibited watercolours in the 1780s; his ambitions as a poet were given an outlet in a privately printed volume of poems and other pieces, the Poetical Sketches, in 1783. The printing of this book was funded by an associate, the Revd A.S. Mathew (1733-1824) with his wife, Harriet, snd the sculptor John Flaxman (1756-1826), then emerging as one of the most promising talents of the younger generation.

Among such men, generally middle class, politically liberal, even radical, Blake enjoyed some reputation as an idiosyncratic but talented writer and original artist. Yet he never made the ‘breakthrough’ of securing a public reputation as a creative artist. By the time Blake was thirty (in 1787) he had established a sound reputation as a reproductive engraver and had even, briefly, set up an independent print publishing shop (in 1784-5), which had, however, failed. He had exhibited a number of watercolours at the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy, which if not wholly ignored had hardly won him much critical attention. He had got married (happily, to Catherine, in 1782) and lost his father (in 1784). He had, importantly, won the attention and friendship of a circle of friends in the cultural world – as well as Flaxman, the famous Swiss-born history painter Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), the illustrator and painter Thomas Stothard (1755-1834), the amateur George Cumberland (1754-1828), and the publisher Joseph Johnson (1738-1809) (who supplied him with much work). He had become more ambitious as a writer, penning an unfinished satirical play (‘An Island in the Moon’, 1784). But he had secured neither fame nor fortune.

After the tragically early death of his much loved brother Robert in 1787 Blake entered his most originally creative phase with his extraordinary invention of ‘relief etching’, which allowed him to intergrate texts and images on single plates. The ‘illuminated books’ that were produced in this method – The Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789-94), The Marriage of Heavenand Hell (1790), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), Americaa Prophecy (1793), Europea Prophecy (1794) – have lay at the heart of Blake’s later reputation as a poet, and have been subject to intensive, sustained critical, descriptive and technical study, even at the expense of his other work and, particularly, his work as a visual artist in more conventional media.

There is much still uncertain about the techniques that Blake employed in creating these books, their historical significance and, in particular, how widely disseminated and known they might have been. There is little doubt that they were produced only in relatively small numbers. They were not like conventionally published books that were meant to be distributed widely (even internationally). Nor were they pictures in the accepted sense, finished watercolours or oil paintings, that could be exhibited in the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Nonetheless, Blake repeatedly invoked the ‘public’ as an important entity in relation to his own work as an original artist and independent printmaker. The ‘Prospectus’, advertising his stock of original prints and illuminated books in 1793, was addressed ‘TO THE PUBLIC’ and sought to bring to their attention the artist’s new printmaking methods which now made possible a level of artistic independence and visibility that had never been known, not even to Shakespeare or Milton. Writing to his patron Thomas Butts (1757-1845) in 1803, he claimed: ‘if it was fit for me I doubt not that I should be Employd in Greater things & when it is proper my Talents shall be properly exercised in Public. as I hope they are now in private, for till then. I leave no stone unturnd & no path unexplord that tends to improvement in my beloved Arts.’2 To his brother James he wrote in the same year: ‘I know that the Public are my friends & love my works & will embrace them whenever they see them My only Difficulty is to produce fast enough.’3 The ‘public’, as envisaged by Blake, optimistically, are more able to recognise his true talents than the connoisseurs and critics who had, at best, neglected his art and at worst openly attacked it.

The problem of conceiving of, and energising, a public for art was a central theme in British art writing of the later eighteenth century.4 In the more abstract and high-minded kinds of art theory art mattered and needed to matter to only a tiny elite. This elite, who were wealthy property-owners (therefore purportedly independent in their views and tastes) and male (and thus, according to the prevailing sexual stereotypes, coolly intellectual), led the nation in politics and could represent its values and qualities in their persons and their tastes. This was the idea, at least. The reality was quite different. Theories of this sort took the societies of the ancient world and Renaissance Italy as their model, but modern Britain was quite different. The religious and political upheavals of the seventeenth century meant that Britain’s court was a relatively weak entity; there were no great princes to hand out patronage in the arts. The Protestant Reformation meant that the Church was a very limited patron of the figurative arts (though there was a huge amount of church building in the eighteenth century, and rather more work for painters and sculptors than has traditionally been imagined). Instead, there was a wealthy and varied – and increasingly so, in both respects – middle rank of society, including landowners, but also professionals, businessmen and skilled craftsmen and traders. How was such a diverse group to be imagined as a ‘public’? And how did this match any notion of the ‘nation’? What, if any, material investments were they prepared to put into art, traditionally associated with the sorts of ostentatious cultural display that were considered intrinsically foreign to Britons?

It was obvious to artists and entrepreneurs that there was money out there to be taken, particularly after the imperial wars of mid-century established Britain’s vast international trade. Wealthy landowners and aristocrats were stirred by patriotism and by the social challenge of the new middle classes to invest in culture, but the beneficiaries of this patronage were limited in number. There appeared to be greater potential in somehow managing the aggregated resources of the middle class, the ‘public’ – or, indeed, the ‘nation’, as it could now be conceived. Art exhibitions, a regular feature of the social calendar in London since 1760, allowed artists directly to address this putative cultural ‘public’, while also serving their own commercial needs.

The Royal Academy exhibition, the most prestigious of the annual exhibitions, was intended as a showcase for the greatest talents of the contemporary British school – on the assumption that these were to be found among the membership of the Royal Academy (who were guaranteed to have their pictures hung) and those artists who passed the critical eyes of the Academy’s judges (a panel of Academicians assessed pictures entered for the annual show and determined the arrangement of the display). Holding the party line, The Morning Chronicle could report at the end of April 1809 on a preview of the show:

Yesterday there was a private view of the intended Exhibition of the Academy, and we rejoice to say the public will find the Artists not merely maintaining their reputation, but advancing it. The present will be found an improved Exhibition. The ardour of emulation is visible in the exertions that the Academicians have made, and the young men have caught the flame which so honourably animates their predecessors.5

Thus stated, the Academy’s exhibition was a place where the historical progress of British art was ensured, with older artists showing their best works, and younger members of the profession competing among themselves to equal their achievements (this being implied in the term ‘emulation’). In reality, the annual exhibitions were widely recognised to be sites of social display, commercial exploitation and rather less high-minded artistic rivalry. The very nature of the hang, with a mass of highly diverse paintings hung frame-to-frame, and the popularity of the shows with the public, ensured that the exhibition was a hot, noisy, overwhelming space, rather than a place where individual works of art could be contemplated singly, and noble thoughts and emotions taken from the experience (fig.2). Artists were quick to recognise that the exhibitions were a prime opportunity to make a name for themselves: by selling pictures directly from the walls of the show or, perhaps more importantly, gaining a reputation or even notoriety, which would ensure future sales, either of pictures or prints reproducing their pictures. Given the overcrowded nature of the art market by this time, with many hundreds, even thousands, of artists competing for a limited number of commissions, painters might try a whole range of tricks to get attention - painting portraits of famous or notorious celebrities, creating garish, dramatic or shocking pictures, even putting their canvases in extravagent and attention-grabbing frames. As early as 1772, Reynolds was concerned that ‘our Exhibitions, while they produce such admirable effects by nourishing emulation and calling out genius, have also a mischievious tendency, by seducing the Painter to an ambition of pleasing indiscriminately the mixed multitude of people who resort to them’.6

Accordingly, the Academy’s exhibitions attracted a great deal of criticism and complaint. The exclusive nature of the Academy’s membership – limited to forty full members, restricted (in principle, at least) to painters in oil, sculptors and architects – had always attracted complaints. Watercolour painters were greatly concerned by what they perceived to be the negligent treatment of their pictures and their exclusion from the Academy. Most critics’ attention was focused on the Great Room – the main exhibition hall – yet only oil paintings were displayed in that grand space (with miniatures clustered around the fireplace). Watercolours were relegated to side rooms, where they were often overlooked. Accordingly a Society for Painters in Watercolour was established in 1805, and set up its own exhibition as an alternative to the Academy.7

Fig.2 Augustus Charles Pugin and Thomas RowlandsonExhibition Room,  Somerset House Aquatint plate from Rudolph Ackermann,The Microcosm of London (1808-10) Guildhall Library, London

Meanwhile, certain wealthy collectors and connoisseurs felt that the artists who ran the Academy were not displaying the degree of responsibility towards the art that they should. Claiming the moral high ground, a group of gentlemen set up the British Institution in 1805, aiming to promote the cause of high art (and a sense of their own importance) by displaying old master paintings from private collections and displaying works by contemporary British painters.

The exhibitions of the Royal Academy and the British Institution remained the major showcase for contemporary British painters, for all the problems inherent in the organisation and display of these shows. An alternative was to set up an independent exhibition, which a number of artists attempted with varying levels of success. Probably the first of these was a one-man show by the painter Nathaniel Hone (1718-84) in St Martin’s Lane, London, in 1775 (close to James Basire’s workshop on Great Queen Street, where Blake was an apprentice at this time). Withdrawing from the Royal Academy exhibitions permanently in 1784, the leading portrait and landscape painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88) held annual shows in his own house. Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97) and the lesser-known George Carter (1737-94) set up their own exhibitions in the 1780s, while John Singleton Copley showed his mammoth paintings of contemporary historical events to enormous critical and public acclaim. James Barry (1741-1806) spent years working for free on a series of huge canvases representing the grandiose theme of the progress of civilisation for the Great Room of the Society of Arts building in the Adelphi complex off the Strand, and this had opened for exhibition in 1783 (fig.3). Henry Fuseli had spent the best part of a decade preparing his one-man Milton Gallery, showing his interpretations of the epic and Sublime poetry of John Milton in a succession of often enormous canvases, but this had flopped terribly when it opened in 1799. This had been modelled on the several, successful galleries of literary paintings by contemporary British artists run by John Boydell, Thomas Macklin and Robert Bowyer in the 1790s and early 1800s. Most recently, J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) had opened a gallery of his own pictures at his house in Harley Street in 1804.

Fig.3 Augustus Charles Pugin and Thomas RowlandsonSociety for the Encouragement of Arts,Adelphi Aquatint plate from Rudolph Ackermann,The Microcosm of London (1808-10) Guildhall Library, London

Blake’s exhibition of 1809 was not, then, in many respects that unusual as an event. Many artists before had tried to acquire a public reputation, and avoid the pitfalls of the big annual exhibitions, by setting up their own shows. Blake may have been unusual in producing such a lengthy, and argumentative, catalogue to accompany the show, but the show was motivated by the same commercial interests that moved his predecessors and peers to venture into exhibition-making. The Descriptive Catalogue (fig.4) opens with a statement about the ‘Conditions of Sale’ (see here