William Blake’s artwork never makes it onto shortbread tins. It is far too disturbing for that. His colours are a psychedelic nightmare. As for his writing, he remains best known for the tub-thumping nationalism of the Last Night of the Proms’ Jerusalem, yet – as with so much of his work – scratch the surface and that poem becomes an anti-establishment tract.
I’ve loved Blake’s work ever since I first discovered his ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’, two complementary poetry sequences which challenge each other and also the reader.
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
(London, ‘Songs of Experience’)
A European context
The Cambridge exhibition is the largest ever devoted to the artist and places Blake amongst European contemporaries such as Philip Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, though its highly academic nature left me with more questions than answers.
Many of Blake’s tiny graphic etchings are on display – visually echoing ancient illustrated manuscripts like the Book of Kells – though their poetry goes largely unremarked and the myths they create remain unresolved.
Visitors are welcomed by portraits of the artist – all high forehead and fervent bright eyes, eyes which in his uncanny life-mask are determinedly closed.
How does one get a handle on the man who created such extraordinary art? After leaving the exhibition, I determined to find out.
Spiritual revival
Born in Soho in 1757, his father a tradesman, Blake was drawn to dangerously thin places as a child, to the edges and ledges of this life. Angels and visions haunted him. He ran home one day, claiming to have seen the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel – too much for his religiously non-conformist mother who roundly slapped him.
The country itself was experiencing a spiritual revival, as the abolitionist preacher John Wesley galloped from town to town challenging the established church and claiming that truth must come to life in everyday experience. At the same time, in Ironbridge the new Bedlam Furnaces were forging the industrial revolution while, to feed them, miners crawled through hell and back.
Though Blake remained in London almost all his life, the fervour of the age burned him to the core.
He married in his twenties, an illiterate woman called Catherine Boucher, whom he taught to read and write – once, a visitor walked in on the couple, innocently reciting from Milton’s Paradise Lost. They were completely starkers.
“Come in!” cried Blake, “it’s only Adam and Eve you know!”
Rejecting conventions
Blake himself had had little formal education and at 14 was apprenticed to the print-maker James Bassire. Art at that time was dominated by rules of classical symmetry but Bassire had him painstakingly sketching the unfashionable medieval monuments and wall-paintings in Westminster Abbey.
Blake would remain forever out of step as he struck on the idea that it was the Gothic, not the rule-bound art of Rome and Athens, which was the true expression of ancient Christianity. His ambition was to be a history painter who could challenge the present.
This rejection of convention led one contemporary reviewer to claim Blake was nothing more than ‘an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement’. However, although he was acquitted, in 1803 he didfind himself in court accused of sedition, supposedly having ‘damned the King of England’.
Revolutionary times
Blake was just 16 when rebels in the American colonies threw British chests of tea into the Boston Harbour. The events across the Atlantic had a lasting influence on the young man whose later works sought to place that revolution in a much larger, mythical context.
At 23 he found himself caught up in an anti-Catholic mob on its way to torch Newgate Prison. The Gordon Riots saw the Bank of England attacked, distilleries at Holborn exploded (turning the drinking water alcoholic) and parts of the city in ruins. Such experiences – reinforced by the Reign of Terror later unleashed in France – contributed to Blake’s absolute belief that he was living though apocalyptic times. Britain, his whole physical world, was in need of a saving myth.
Mysticism and redemption
Blake was drawn to the work of the antiquarian William Stukeley. Stukeley had refuted the claim made by Inigo Jones (who introduced Classical architecture to Britain) that Stonehenge must be a Roman temple. It was, he said, the temple of the British Druids (or Celts) celebrating their unnamed ancient deity. ‘Jerusalem’ (Blake’s 1804 sequence, not to be confused with the infamous poem) in turn conjures mythical beings, struggling for freedom. When redemption finally arrives, it does so against the backdrop of what looks suspiciously like Stonehenge.
In his later years Blake returned to one of his early apprentice pieces, enhancing it and giving it a new title, ‘Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion’ (Joseph being the bearer of the Holy Grail and founder of Glastonbury Abbey). In the margin Blake writes, ‘This is one of the Gothic Artists who Built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages’ (my italics).
The present must learn from the past and the artist would be its prophet.
Blake’s legacy
William Blake died in 1827. Just fourteen years later the embryonic science of paleontology would finally kill off St George’s dragon, and label the corpse a dinosaur. Myth now extended to the Bible as rationalism challenged simple literal interpretation.
In his obituary, the London Evening Standard described Blake simply as ‘a singular and very able man.’ He left ‘nothing except some pictures, copper-plates, and his principal work, a hundred large designs from Dante.’ Nothing, that is, except a unique mythology with wider echoes: a desire for change, an end to oppression, a New Jerusalem.
It’s true to say that the William Blake’s Universe exhibition has its flaws. It also has some fantastic pictures and if you feel up for the challenge, is certainly worth a visit.
William Blake’s Universe continues at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 19 May 2024. Pay-what-you-like tickets are available from: https://tickets.museums.cam.ac.uk/overview/7809
Other events taking place this weekend (tickets available at time of writing)
Cambridgeshire
Sunday 21 April, 10:30am – 12:30pm: Great Fen Signs of Spring – a guided walk at Woodwalton Fen National Nature Reserve organised by the Wildlife Trust. Tickets free for members, £7-10 can be booked here.
Essex
Saturday 20 April, 12:30 – 2pm: Learn about the Roman history of Colchester on this walking tour. Archaeologist, Nick reveals its secrets from two millennia ago. Sets off from the Mercury Theatre. Tickets £8 can be booked here.
Norfolk
Sunday 21 April, 11-12pm: Toddlers Make Books is a sensory workshop for small people (0-3) and their grown-ups. Venue: The Stage, St Augustines Street, Norwich. Tickets £8 for 1 adult and 1 child. Book here.
Suffolk
Saturday 20 April at 7:00pm: Haydn’s The Creation – a choral masterpiece. Venue: Snape Maltings. Tickets: £45, £35, £20. Book here.
