William Blake made books in which poems and pictures belonged to the same imaginative world. Poet, painter and printmaker, he devised a form of illuminated printing that allowed words and designs to share a page, and used it to create works including Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Much of his work went unrecognised during his lifetime. Its later standing rests not only on the force of his poetry and images, but on the distinctive way he brought them together.

Learning to draw and engrave

Blake was born in Soho, London, on 28 November 1757, the third of seven children. His father, James, was a hosier. William attended school long enough to learn reading and writing, then received much of his education at home from his mother, Catherine. At ten, he began drawing lessons at Henry Pars’s drawing school in the Strand. His father had bought him prints of Greek antiquities to copy; Blake also read widely, including the work of Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser. The Bible was an enduring source of imagery and inspiration.

On 4 August 1772, aged 14, he became an apprentice to the engraver James Basire. Two years later, Basire sent him to make drawings in London’s Gothic churches. His work at Westminster Abbey, with its tombs, painted effigies and medieval forms, helped shape his visual imagination. At 21, he completed his apprenticeship and became a professional engraver.

In 1779, Blake enrolled at the Royal Academy. He objected to the approach of its president, Joshua Reynolds, particularly the emphasis on generalised ideas of beauty. Blake instead valued particular forms and the expressive line. His disagreements did not keep him from exhibiting there: he submitted work on six occasions between 1780 and 1808. Around 1783, his youthful verse attracted support for the publication of Poetical Sketches.

Making books with Catherine

Blake met Catherine Boucher in 1781; they married in 1782. Catherine became his close collaborator as well as his partner in life. She worked as a printmaker and colourist, mixing and applying colours to his printed works. Their joint labour matters to the story of Blake’s books: he supplied neither their words nor their images in isolation from the practical work of making them.

In 1784, Blake opened a print shop with James Parker, a former fellow apprentice. He also developed a new way to make his own illustrated books. By 1788, he had devised relief etching, which he used to print text and image together from a copper plate. He wrote and drew in reverse with an acid-resistant medium; acid ate away the unprotected parts of the plate, leaving the design raised for printing. The resulting pages could then be hand-coloured and bound. Blake called the method illuminated printing. It gave him unusual control over the relation between a poem and its accompanying image.

Songs of Innocence appeared in 1789; Songs of Experience followed, and the two were brought together as Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Their contrasting states of mind give the poems a structure that is at once literary and visual. Blake also produced prophetic books, including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Jerusalem. Alongside this personal work, commercial engraving provided much of his professional income.

Patrons, commissions and a changing reputation

Blake’s career depended in part on patrons and publishers, but he could be at odds with those who supported him. In 1800, he moved with Catherine to Felpham in Sussex to illustrate the work of William Hayley. There he began Milton, whose preface contains the poem beginning “And did those feet in ancient time”, later used as the words of the anthem “Jerusalem”. Blake eventually returned to London and worked on Jerusalem, his most ambitious prophetic book.

In 1809, he held an exhibition in his brother’s shop in Soho, showing his own version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims and other works. Few people attended and no paintings sold. In his later years he received support from patrons including Thomas Butts, for whom he made Bible illustrations. A commission from John Linnell led to his final major project: illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. Blake died in London on 12 August 1827, aged 69, before completing it.

During his life, Blake’s work was little recognised, and he sold fewer than 30 copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience before his death. His reputation grew after the publication of Alexander Gilchrist’s biography in the 1860s, when artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti took an interest in his work. In the twentieth century, readers and artists continued to find new ways into his poetry, pictures and unusual printing methods.

Why William Blake deserves a place in British Legacy

Blake deserves a place in British Legacy because he changed what a printed poem could be. Rather than treating illustration as an addition to finished writing, he made text and image together on the page, using a process he developed himself. In the illuminated books, the design, lettering and verse form a single object. That achievement depended on both artistic invention and skilled printing; it also involved Catherine Boucher’s sustained work as a colourist and printmaker. Remembering their collaboration gives a fuller account of how the books were made.

His importance also lies in the persistence of a career that was not rewarded with broad recognition in his own lifetime. Blake moved between commercial engraving and personal works whose symbolism resisted easy classification. He challenged accepted ideas about art, religion and the imagination, and made those challenges part of the form of his books. His work later spoke to writers, artists and composers, while “Jerusalem”, drawn from the preface to Milton, became familiar far beyond the pages where it began. Blake’s legacy is therefore both specifically British and enduring: a London-born artist whose inventive practice reshaped the possibilities of poetry and print, and whose books continue to invite close reading as works of art as well as literature.

Sources

William Blake — Wikipedia revision 1379569469

Adapted in part from William Blake by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.