William Blake
Birth Year : 1757
Death Year : 1827
Country : United Kingdom
William Blake, poet, engraver, painter, and mystic, was
born and lived almost his entire life in London. He was
apprenticed to an engraver at the age of fourteen and
began to write and publish his own books when he was
twenty-six. His most famous book of poems, "Songs of
Innocence", appeared in 1789. It was written, printed,
engraved, and bound by the artist himself, with the aid
of his wife. Although Blake never left England, he
studied the work of
Michelangelo and the Italian Mannerists from a large
collection of engravings, and he was one of several
artists influenced by
John Henry Fuseli, an Anglo-Swiss painter who
worshiped Shakespeare and
Michelangelo,. Blake, for his part, was devoted to
the Bible, to Dante, and to Milton. He also admired the
medieval period and conceived of his own books as
eighteenth-century successors to the illuminated
manuscripts of the medieval monks.
His work is religious or mystical in expression and
romantic in spirit. It is full of movement, flickering
or glaring light, medieval symbols, and mannerist
musculature and arrangement. Blake was noted for his
scrupulous honesty and resisted all offers of patronage
by the rich, preferring to work in poverty and
independence. He was comparatively unknown in England
until 1818, when one of his disciples, John Linnell,
organized a group who bought Blake's drawings and helped
secure commissions for The Book of Job and The Devine
Comedy. Blake died before the latter was completed,
having engraved only seven of the one hundred
watercolours he had made for the book.
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