Early career
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, 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 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 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 Royal Academy, 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 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.
In 1782 Blake met John Flaxman, who was to become his patron. In the same year he married a poor, illiterate girl named Catherine Boucher, who was five years his junior. Catherine signed her wedding contract with an X. Blake taught her to read and write and even trained her as an engraver. At that time, George Cumberland, one of the founders of the National Gallery, London became an admirer of Blake's work.
After his father's death, William and brother Robert opened a print shop in 1784 and began working with radical publisher Joseph Johnson. At Johnson's house he met some of the leading intellectual dissidents of the time in England, including Joseph Priestley, scientist; Richard Price, philosopher; John Henry Fuseli, painter whom he became friends with; Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist; and Thomas Paine, American revolutionary. Along with William Wordsworth and William Godwin, Blake had great hopes for the American and French revolution and wore a red liberty cap in solidarity with the French revolutionaries, but despaired with the rise of Maximilien Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in the French revolution.
Mary Wollstonecraft became a close friend, and Blake illustrated her . They shared similar views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage. in 1793 Blake condemned the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love and defended the right of women to complete self-fulfillment.
In 1788, at the age of thirty-one, Blake began to experiment with relief etching, which was the method used to produce most of his books of poems. Blake wrote in a letter that the method was revealed to him in a dream, by his dead brother, Robert. The process is also referred to as illuminated printing, and final products as illuminated books or prints. Illuminated printing involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in acid in order to dissolve away the untreated copper and leave the design standing. The pages printed from these plates then had to be hand-colored in water colors and stitched together to make up a volume. Blake used illuminated printing for four of his works: the Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion Jerusalem. Each of his illuminated books was thus a unique work of art and a radical break with not only traditional book printing but the traditional means of presenting poetic and philosophical discourse. Blake seems to have believed, or rather hoped, that self published books could liberate the artist and author from the tyranny of censorship by Church and State but its time consuming nature meant that his most personal and prophetic works reached a minute audience in his lifetime.
Later life
Blake's marriage to Catherine remained a close and devoted one until his death. There were early problems, however, such as Catherine's illiteracy and the couple's failure to produce children. At one point, Blake suggested bringing in a concubine. Catherine was distressed at the idea, and he dropped it. Later in life, the pair seem to have settled down, and their apparent domestic harmony in middle age is better documented than their early difficulties.
Later in his life Blake sold a great number of works, particularly his Bible illustrations, to Thomas Butts, a patron who saw Blake more as a friend in need than an artist. Geoffrey Keynes, a biographer, described Butts as 'a dumb admirer of genius, which he could see but not quite understand.' Dumb or not, we have him to thank for eliciting and preserving so many works.
About 1800 Blake moved to a cottage at Felpham in Sussex to take up a job illustrating the works of William Hayley, a mediocre poet. It was in this cottage that Blake wrote Milton: a Poem. The preface to this book included the poem And did those feet in ancient time, which Blake decided to discard for later editions. This is ironic, because, as the words to the hymn Jerusalem, this is now one of Blake's most well-known if not well-understood poems.
Slavery was abhorred by Blake, who believed in racial and sexual equality, with several of his poems and paintings expressing a notion of universal humanity. He retained an active interest in social and political events for all his life, but was often forced to resorting to cloaking social idealism and political statements in protestant mystical allegory. His constant vision for humanity was rebuilding "Jerusalem" on earth, a uniting of the physical and spiritual sides of human nature, free of economic exploitation, with people able to develop the full potential of their being. Blake rejected all forms of imposed authority, indeed was charged with assault and uttering seditious and treasonable expressions against the King in 1803, but was cleared in the Chichester assizes of the charges.
Blake's views on what he saw as oppression and restriction of rightful freedom extended to the Church. Blake was himself a follower of Unitarian philosophy, and he said in 1788 "There is no natural religion... All religions are one". This followed the publication of his Songs of Experience.
Blake returned to London in 1802 and began to write and illustrate . He was introduced by George Cumberland to a young artist named John Linnell. Through Linnell he met Samuel Palmer, who belonged to a group of artists who called themselves the Ancients. This group shared Blake's rejection of modern trends and his belief in a spiritual and artistic New Age. Blake benefited from this group technically, by sharing in their advances in watercolour painting, and personally, by finding a receptive audience for his ideas.
At the age of sixty-five Blake began work on illustrations for the Book of Job. These works were later admired by John Ruskin, who compared Blake favourably to Rembrandt.
William Blake died in 1827 and was buried in an unmarked grave at Bunhill Fields, London. In recent years, a proper memorial was erected for him and his wife.
While on his deathbed, Blake was still hard at work on his series of watercolors illustrating Dante's Divine Comedy, and on another version of his own "Ancient of Days" (this is arguably his most famous and his most misread piece). His last work was a sketch of his wife, now lost: observing her weeping at his bedside, he cried 'Stay! Let me draw you exactly as you are, for you have ever been an angel to me.' He completed the sketch, and died shortly after. Perhaps his life is summed up by his statement that "The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself."
English writer, Peter Marshall, in William Blake: Visionary Anarchist (1988), described Blake as:
- "a revolutionary anarchist, looking back to the gnostic heresies of the Middle Ages and anticipating modern anarchism and social ecology. With William Godwin, he stands as a great forerunner of British Anarchism".
Blake is also recognized as a Saint in Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica.