Know the Artist_ William Blake

William Blake created a profound body of visual and literary art between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but as is often the case with vanguard visionaries, many of his peers dismissed his unusual contributions. Today we celebrate the London-born Romantic-era poet, painter, and engraver, whose sublime creative intuition was largely overlooked during his lifetime. This is Several Circles. William Blake, who lived from 1757 until 1827, was a quintessential contemporary artist in his day. His poems are abstract musings on the human condition, and his art favors the expression of sentiment over realism. Blake's work sits within the ideology of Romanticism, a European intellectual movement that gained traction across art, music, and literature toward the end of the 18th century. Romanticism challenged the Age of Enlightenment's call for reason, and rejected the unbiased realism of the concurrent neoclassical movement. Rather, Romantic artists valued the individual's intensity of emotion, as is likewise exemplified in the work of English painters J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, French painter Eugène Delacroix, Spanish painter Francisco Goya, and the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli, who was one of Blake's few advocates. Blake skewed unusually avant-garde, even for the Romantics. He vehemently championed the artist's imagination over objectivity, and breathed life and energy into a pantheon of gods, angels, and hybrid creatures. But these figures were seemingly quite real to him. Blake experienced visions throughout his life, claiming to have seen God in his window at age four, and at nine, a tree of angels with brilliant wings, which he likened to stars. As an adult, Blake would attribute much of his creative inspiration to the ghosts and heavenly beings who visited him. Blake was born in London to supportive, working-class parents who were disturbed by their son's hallucinations, but acknowledged his exceptional mind. They enrolled him in art classes at age 10, when he expressed interest in becoming a painter. He studied at Henry Parr's drawing school until his family could no longer afford it, after which it was determined that a 14-year-old Blake would train to become an engraver. He apprenticed with the renowned British engraver James Bassire for several years, all the while sketching his own interpretations of medieval and Renaissance artworks by the likes of Fra Angelico and Raphael. These sentimental paintings not only honed Blake's artistic eye, but fueled the spirit of his poetry. Blake left his engraving apprenticeship in his early 20s to pursue formal art studies at the Royal Academy in London. Disillusioned with the principles of the curriculum, he soon dropped out and found work engraving books and periodicals. His popularity as an engraver helped him and his beloved wife Catherine, whom he married in 1782, maintain some financial security. In 1783, Blake published his first book of poems, which he's believed to have written between the ages of 12 and 20. Entitled Poetical Sketches, the book contains lyrical odes to the Four Seasons, lamentations about visionless contemporary poetry, and political commentary. Mind you, Blake would live through the American and French Revolutions, as well as the Napoleonic Wars. Though Poetical Sketches wasn't the wild success Blake had hoped for, he subsequently founded a print shop so that he could continue to publish his own texts. He cultivated an original method of printing called relief etching, by which he could adorn the margins of his poems with magnificent illustrations, a technique guided by the spirit of his late brother, Robert. In 1789, Blake self-published Songs of Innocence, followed by the more somber Songs of Experience. At its core, Blake's poetry was a manifesto for the masses, and a cautionary tale for children, whom he believed might actually understand his message with the greatest clarity. These poems address the existential tragedy of the inherently passionate, rethinking individual who is systematically repressed by society. The tiger, which appears in Songs of Experience, would become one of the most venerated and anthologized poems in the English language. In 1795, Blake produced a group of 12 designs for color prints, in which he depicts subjects from history, mythology, and the Bible, as well as texts by the English poets John Milton and Shakespeare. These prints are considered amongst Blake's most important works of art, exemplary of his exaggerated geometric style, use of color, and his uncanny ability to evoke the emotion of a scene. It was also circa 1795 when Blake met his most loyal and active patron, Thomas Butz. He was the ideal patron for Blake, as he commissioned numerous illustrations, but left the artist to his own devices. At the turn of the century, Blake and his wife relocated to the seaside village of Feltham, where he worked for the writer William Haley until 1803. While this period of time proved inspirational to Blake, Haley's irritating habit of making creative suggestions forced the two to part ways. Blake's increasingly radical disposition and refusal to compromise his vision for money rendered the artist a notorious caricature of insanity and solitude. His departure from academia also came back to haunt him. He was essentially seen as an outsider artist, whose diversion from the establishment resulted in a disappointing lack of publicity. And what he did put out for the public eye was largely misunderstood. In 1809, he organized a solo show of what he considered to be his most important paintings. He saw them as spectacular frescoes in the making that could rival the greatest Renaissance masterworks. Instead, they were slammed by the only critic who attended. The defeat marked a crushing downturn in Blake's finances as well as his psyche. But in 1818, Blake fortuitously met the English painter and engraver John Linnell, whose patronage helped keep the artist somewhat afloat in his twilight years. Linnell commissioned illustrations for the Book of Job and, most famously, Dante's Divine Comedy, though Blake died before completing the latter project. But of priceless value was Linnell's connection with a group of young artists known as the Ancients, who assembled over a shared appreciation for Blake's ingenuity. While the majority of Blake's peers turned their noses up to his work, which ultimately kept him from commercial success, the Ancients transformed Blake into a teacher and muse in his final years. Despite their support, Blake died in relative obscurity at age 69 in 1827. Blake spent his entire life creating against the grain, and only after his death did the following generations come to comprehend the rarity of his genius. Though he was unable to enjoy the posthumous fame he knew he deserved, Blake unknowingly laid the groundwork for so many artists to come, from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to the Symbolists and numerous modern mavericks across disciplines. From September 2019 until February 2020, Tate Britain in London held the largest Blake retrospective in 20 years. They put over 300 of his artworks on view, including a recreation of his devastating exhibition in 1809. This time, Blake received his due acclaim. Thanks for watching Several Circles. Don't forget to subscribe for more videos about the lives and work of extraordinary artists from across history to the present day.