The gospel according to William Blake
Dodge the lingering tourists ambling through the plush rooms of the National Gallery in Edinburgh and deep in the basement you will find an exhibition devoted to one of this island’s foremost artists.
A fascinating, and rather surprising, first full showing for the National Gallery’s impressive collection of the work of poet, illustrator, artist, radical politician and philosopher William Blake (1757-1827), this is an exhibition that must be seen, even if, hemmed in by the Scottish Collection, with one section straggling out into the corridor, it could do with more space to show off its considerable artistic interest.
William Blake was an artist of immense imagination, a radical revisionist whose work influenced not only his immediate disciples, the select, self-labelled group of artists The Ancients (some of whose work is displayed here), but much of our modern perception.
And Blake was a very modern man, even if few of his contemporaries recognised his importance. He was an illustrator who took on the dark, nightmarish visions of the Romantic painters and transplanted them (etched on copper plate) with his own strange mix of rawness and elegance to the printed page.
Some of Blake’s best-known work is studied in sixth forms across the UK. The masterful book of his own poetry, Songs of Innocence and Experience, illustrated by his own brightly coloured, darkly imagined prints, with its Tygers burning bright, its sick roses and invisible worms that fly in the night, was just one of his works impregnated with his individual philosophy and unique vision of the rights and wrongs of the soul and the flesh.
The National Gallery’s holdings, largely concerned with his more religious illustrations - for Robert Blair’s poem The Grave, and The Book of Job, among others - demonstrate his rather unorthodox philosophy (and his disapproval of institutionalised religion) and innovative technique.
In the minutely detailed series of prints for The Book of Job (1825) made shortly before his death in 1827, fully worked-up marginal illustrations add another layer to the immaculately designed central plates.
Elsewhere, one look at Blake’s God, in the dynamic watercolour, God Writing upon the Tablets of the Covenant (1805), hints at his individual religiosity.
Blake’s God is muscular and sinewy, his Almightiness demonstrated through his diaphanously-cloaked physique, facing away from the viewer, the recoiling angels spread in waves before him. In the prints designed for The Grave (1813), amid horror-struck sinners and the blinking, open eyes of the righteous, Blake’s Last Judgement, a detailed image that clearly takes its inspiration, structurally, from Michelangelo’s treatment of the subject in the Sistine Chapel, with its vengeful Christ, a young couple, hidden among those ascending to Heaven, grope each other in a very worldly embrace. Elsewhere, a female soul rejoins a male body with a fervent, embracing kiss. There is life in every corner - none of Blake’s vibrant, supple characters acts “by rote”.
Walking around this exhibition, the words of that other great William of English letters, Shakespeare, seem strangely appropriate to Blake’s outlook on the world: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
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