William Blake: Difference between revisions

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Blake was born at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, [[London]] into a middle-class family. He was from earliest youth a seer of visions and a dreamer of dreams, seeing "Ezekiel sitting under a green bough", and "a tree full of angels at Peckham", and such he remained to the end of his days. His teeming imagination sought expression both in verse and in drawing. At ten years old, he began [[engraving]] copies of drawings of [[ancient Greece|Greek]] antiquities, a practice that was then preferred to real-life [[drawing]]. Four years later he became apprenticed to an engraver, James Basire. After two years Basire sent him to copy art from the [[Gothic architecture|Gothic]] [[church]]es in London. At the age of twenty-one Blake finished his apprenticeship and set up as a professional engraver.

In [[1779]], he became a student at the [[Royalsex Academyacademy]], where he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as [[Rubens]]. He preferred the Classical exactness of [[Michelangelo]] and [[Raffaello Santi|Raphael]].

In July, [[1780]], he was at the head of a rampaging mob that stormed [[Newgate Prison]] in London. The mob were wearing blue [[cockade]]s (ribbons) on their caps, to symbolise solidarity with the insurrection in the American colonies. This disturbance, later known as the [[Gordon riots]], provoked a flurry of paranoid legislation from the government of [[George III]], as well as the creation of the first police force.