Works by William Blake

William Blake put his words and pictures on one copper plate, printed the pages himself and coloured them by hand, much of it with his wife Catherine.

Apprenticed in 1772 to the engraver James Basire, Blake worked in line and refused mezzotint, whose fine dots he likened to Newton's particles of light. In 1788 he turned etching inside out: he painted text and image backwards in varnish on copper, let acid eat the bare metal, and printed from what stood up. The printed pages were then coloured by hand in watercolour, and Catherine Boucher, whom he married in 1782, mixed his colours and helped lay them on. In the Urizen plates of 1794 the colour was printed too, and it sits on the paper as a grainy crust, as in Urizen, where an old head rises out of dark water below a figure trailing flames. In one frontispiece from Jerusalem, printed in orange ink, names are lettered into the picture: a naked man stands in a column of fire, arms spread, with HAND written at his feet and JERUSALEM under the woman facing him.

For twelve large colour-printed drawings in 1795 he brushed thick, sticky paint onto board, pressed it onto paper, then worked over the print with watercolour and pen, so no two pulls of one design match. In Satan Exulting over Eve the printed earth under Eve is rough and fibrous, while the flames behind Satan are mostly smooth watercolour washes. The same speckled surface covers the rock in Newton, where the naked scientist bends over a scroll with a pair of compasses; Blake rejected the Newtonian picture of the universe.

From the late 1790s he also painted in tempera, a method he called fresco. In Virgin and Child Mary raises both hands in prayer against a dark, starry sky, and gold lights the halos, which the museum reads as a nod to early Christian mosaics and icons. He met John Linnell in 1818, and through him Samuel Palmer; Linnell also brought him the commission to illustrate Dante in 1826, which his death the next year cut short. Prints make up the bulk of the works below, with some drawings and a few paintings, most of them religious or mythic in subject.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Gallery, Yale Center for British Art, J. Paul Getty Museum. Portrait: Thomas Phillips.