Blake and history painting

Recent commentary on Blake has tended to find the core of his achievement in the prophetic books of the 1790s and in the later prophecies, Milton and Jerusalem. These books speak now to a world that relishes their complexity, unresolved nature, and play between image and text. Yet they represent only a part of his achievement, and were the focus of his attention, as far as we know, only between 1788 and 1796, and again between 1804 and c. 1820.He was more continuously preoccupied with his work as a painter in tempera and watercolor of biblical and literary subjects, usually in series. Blake's “illustrations” are not a secondary activity but are quite as personal and imaginative as his prophetic work. It is true that there were artists like Blake's friend Thomas Stothard who made a living from designing illustrations to novels and other works, and Blake often engraved from the drawings. But such illustrations were clearly subordinate to the text. Blake's designs, on the other hand, constitute an active engagement with each text by an artist who never doubted that he was the peer of any author. Furthermore, his designs are informed by assumptions and traditions that belong to discourses of art rather than literature. They look back to the Italian Renaissance and to ancient Greece, and in later years to Gothic and even Hindu traditions. The fact that the starting point for almost all of Blake's temperas, watercolors, and some separate prints was a text written by another author no more diminishes them than Michelangelo's use of the Bible diminishes the Sistine Chapel. Blake argued that each of his tempera or watercolor designs had the potential to be hugely enlarged, and that his method of “portable Fresco” (E 527) would enable him to produce public paintings on a monumental scale.