Instead of Ryland the family settled on a lesser-known engraver, James Basire. William, however, resisted the arrangement telling his father, “I do not like the man’s face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged!” The grim prophecy was to come true 12 years later. At first his father took him to William Ryland, a highly respected engraver. The expense of continued formal training in art was a prohibitive, and the family decided that at the age of 14 William would be apprenticed to a master engraver. His parents did, however, encourage his artistic talents, and the young Blake was enrolled at the age of 10 in Pars’ drawing school. According to Gilchrist, on one ramble he was startled to “see a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” His parents were not amused at such a story, and only his mother’s pleadings prevented him from receiving a beating. Even at an early age, however, his unique mental powers would prove disquieting. As a young boy he wandered the streets of London and could easily escape to the surrounding countryside. Blake seems to have been closest to his youngest brother, Robert, who died young.īy all accounts Blake had a pleasant and peaceful childhood, made even more pleasant by skipping any formal schooling. In all, seven children were born to James and Catherine Wright Blake, but only five survived infancy. His father, James, was a hosier, and the family lived at 28 Broad Street in London in an unpretentious but “respectable” neighborhood. Unlike many well-known writers of his day, Blake was born into a family of moderate means. In addition to being considered one of the most visionary of English poets and one of the great progenitors of English Romanticism, his visual artwork is highly regarded around the world.īlake was born on November 28, 1757. Far from being an isolated mystic, Blake lived and worked in the teeming metropolis of London at a time of great social and political change that profoundly influenced his writing. In his Life of William Blake (1863) Alexander Gilchrist warned his readers that Blake “neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for work’y-day men at all, rather for children and angels himself ‘a divine child,’ whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth.” Yet Blake himself believed that his writings were of national importance and that they could be understood by a majority of his peers. Though in his lifetime his work was largely neglected or dismissed, he is now considered one of the leading lights of English poetry, and his work has only grown in popularity. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of the Romantic movement and as "Pre-Romantic".Poet, painter, engraver, and visionary William Blake worked to bring about a change both in the social order and in the minds of men. While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich œuvre, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God" or "human existence itself".Īlthough Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, he is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. His visual artistry led 21st-century critic Jonathan Jones to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". What he called his prophetic works were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker.
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