Blake, WILLIAM, engraver, painter, and poet, was born in London on the 28th of November 1757, the son of a hosier. He was a dreamy boy, addicted to drawing and verse-making, and fond of solitary rambles in the country, during which he believed that he saw visions of angels in the sky and among the trees. At the age of ten he began to study art in Par's Academy in the Strand, and four years later he was apprenticed to James Basire, the engraver, in whose antiquarian prints he assisted, and for whom he executed drawings from the ancient monuments in the churches of London and its neighbourhood. His apprenticeship ended in 1778; and, after studying in the Antique School of the Royal Academy, he began to produce water-colour figure-subjects, and to engrave illustrations for the Ladies' Magazine, and, after Stothard, for the Novelists' Magazine. His first picture exhibited in the Royal Academy was 'The Death of Earl Godwin,' shown in 1780. His leisure had from early years been devoted to the composition of poems, of which the first volume, the Poetical Sketches by W. B., published in 1783, is full of true pastoral feeling and of an exquisitely spontaneous lyrical power. This work, with the Songs of Innocence (1789), and the Songs of Experience (1794), include the finest examples of Blake's poetry, for the so-called 'Prophetic Books'—the Book of Thel (1789), the Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1791), The French Revolution (1791), The Song of Los (1795), and many others—are strangely mystical and unintelligible, and owe most of the interest to the imaginative designs which are usually interwoven with their text.
All his poetical works, with the exception of the Poetical Sketches and The French Revolution, were produced in a method peculiar to the artist himself, a method which, he related, was communicated to him in a vision by the spirit of a deceased brother. Their text, with its illustrative designs and decorative marginal enrichments, was inscribed upon copper-plates with a kind of stopping-out varnish, and the surrounding metal was then bitten away with acid, the result in each case being a plate in relief, which was printed on paper with ink of various tints, the impressions being finally coloured with extreme beauty and elaboration by the artist's own hand. His innumerable designs of poetic and imaginative figure-subjects were usually executed in washed monochrome or in water-colours. They include a superb series of 537 coloured illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts, of which 43 subjects were engraved by Blake and published in 1797, and 12 designs to Blair's Grace, which were etched by Schiavonetti and published in 1808. In his paintings Blake used a method which he was accustomed to style 'fresco'—in reality a process of tempera upon a ground prepared with glue and whiting. Among the most important of such works is 'The Canterbury Pilgrims,' purchased by Sir William Stirling-Maxwell of Keir, Perthshire, which the artist himself engraved, a picture quaint in conception, and showing the errors and exaggerations of form common in the artist's productions, but full of character and individuality; 'The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth,' now in the National Gallery, London; 'Jacob's Dream,' shown in the Royal Academy of 1808; and 'The Last Judgment,' one of his latest paintings, executed for the Countess of Egremont. It is, however, in his engravings from his own designs that Blake's finest artistic work is to be found; and among these the 21 'Illustrations to the Book of Job' hold the first place. They were the production of the artist's old age, published in 1826, when he was verging upon seventy. In imaginative force and visionary power they are unequalled in modern religious art and unsurpassed in the art of the past, while the directness and spirit of their method recalls the works of Durer and the other great painter-engravers of the 15th and 16th centuries. They were followed by the illustrations to Dante, upon which Blake was employed at the time of his death. He is also known as a wood-engraver by his series of 17 cuts contributed to a now very scarce edition of Thornton's Virgil. Though rude in execution, these prints are full of the very spirit of idyllic poetry, and their technique shows a remarkable perception of the true direction and special capabilities of the special artistic method.
During his life Blake met with little encouragement from the public. The exhibition of his works, which he held in 1809 in Broad Street, was a complete failure; his name was unknown to ordinary picture-buyers, and even at the end of his life, when he was producing his immortal 'Illustrations to the Book of Job,' he occupied, with his ever-faithful wife, a single small room in Fountain's Court, Strand. Yet he had his own little circle of true-hearted friends. The poet Hayley rendered him not ineffectual aid; Flaxman was his friend from youth; among his disciples in age were Samuel Palmer and John Linnell, and the generous assistance of the latter rendered his last days free from pecuniary anxiety. And all through his life he was upheld by the most real and vivid faith in the unseen, guided and encouraged—as he believed—by perpetual visitations from the spiritual world. He died in London on the 12th of August 1827, 'singing of the things he saw in heaven.' See Swinburne's essay (1868), and the editions of the life and works by Gilchrist (2d ed. 1880), and by Ellis and Yeats (3 vols. 1893).