William Blake

William Blake (1757-1827) was a British Romantic artist, poet, and inventor. In addition to poems, sketches, oils, and watercolors, he produced many of his most famous works using a unique but expensive copper printing technique, enabling him to make multiple differently-colored versions of his illustrated poetic works. Blake scholar Seren Makdisi claims that this proto-industrial process was conceived as a counter to the standardizing manufacturing processes of Blake’s London, which was completely transformed during Blake’s lifetime from a series of unconnected villages into an enormous military-industrial hub. Despite poems such as ‘London’ that decried the violence and repression of the British imperial regime, Blake was no religious traditionalist and belatedly emerged as one of the most conceptually and technically daring artists to emerge in British art history. The symbolism of Blake’s work is based around a famously difficult-to-navigate personal mythology that kept his work from mainstream appreciation during his lifetime and in the century after his death. However, he was rediscovered by Alexander Gilchrist at the beginning of the 20th century and became notorious for his radically rebellious and anti-establishment readings of religion and literary history. Drawing heavily on the Bible and the work of English poet John Milton, Blake famously claimed that Paradise Lost, one of the biggest and most important poems written in English, was written in sympathy with the devil and that Milton himself was ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’ Blake’s combination of devout religious belief, individual vision, and artistic prowess made him an icon for Anglo-American artists and poets in the 20th century, from W.B. Yeats and Francis Bacon to Philip Pullman, who was inspired by both Blake and Milton in the writing of the His Dark Materials series of novels.