Catherine Blake printed and coloured a “mad” genius’s books
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) died obscure and was later crowned a Romantic prophet of word and image. Neighbors called him mad; posterity praised the mystical systems. For some forty-five years his wife Catherine Boucher printed and coloured the illuminated books beside him.
His father James was a hosier, and although the family were Moravian Dissenters, the boy was baptised at St James's, Piccadilly. He left school at ten, able to read and write, and was otherwise taught at home by his mother. The Bible shaped him for life, and he described childhood visions of God's face at the window, angels among haystacks and a visit from the prophet Ezekiel. His father bought him prints of Greek antiquities to copy, introducing him to Raphael, Michelangelo and Dürer, and enrolled him at Henry Pars's drawing school in the Strand.
In August 1772 he was apprenticed for seven years to the engraver James Basire for £52 10s. Basire's line engraving was already considered old-fashioned beside stipple and mezzotint, which may later have cost Blake work. Sent to copy Gothic monuments in Westminster Abbey, he absorbed its faded colour and effigies, reported visions of Christ and a procession of chanting monks, and once knocked a tormenting Westminster schoolboy off a scaffold, after which the Dean withdrew the boys' access.
From 1779 he studied at the Royal Academy, where he came to loathe its president Joshua Reynolds. Where Reynolds praised generalising as the glory of the mind, Blake scribbled in the margin that to generalise is to be an idiot. David Bindman argues the real grievance was Reynolds's failure to practise his own ideals, and Blake still exhibited at the Academy six times between 1780 and 1808.
He spent his whole life in London apart from three years at Felpham. He despised the Church of England, drew on Swedenborg, stayed friendly with Thomas Paine, and treated imagination as the body of God. Northrop Frye called the prophetic books the least read poetry in English relative to their merit, and William Michael Rossetti hailed him as a glorious luminary without predecessor or successor.
Source: William Blake
