Lecturer: Luisa Calè, l.cale@bbk.ac.uk
In this session we will examine some of William Blake’s works in illuminated printing, exploring his practice of invention as a poet, painter, printmaker, and book artist.
In 1793, Blake claimed to have invented “a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered … a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet”. Through relief etching, the poet gained control over the process of composition, using the same technique to trace text and design and define the layout of text and image on the page. Around 1796 he reprinted some designs from the illuminated books without the accompanying texts, repurposing them as colour printing samples within a book of designs for the Royal Academy miniature painter Ozias Humphry. In 1818 Blake intervened on second pulls from this printing session, tracing framing lines around the images and adding emblematic captions that can be compared to his emblem book The Gates of Paradise (1793/1818).
This seminar and workshop will focus on Blake’s prophetic verbal-visual compositions and their repurposing as separate copperplate designs, comparing their function in his prophetic books to their alternative possibilities as single leaves or as pages from an emblem book.
In focus:
1. prophetic writing, emblematic thinking, and commonplaces: in my introductory presentation I will use the marginalia to Europe a Prophecy copy D to focus on the relationship between writing, reading, and commonplacing, and The Book of Urizen to think about how Blake engages with the emblem tradition and reflects on book making.
2. text and image: fixed page layout; the book as a collection of moveable parts.
3. afterlives: After examining Blake’s illuminated books as a ‘composite art’ (Mitchell), in the second part of the session we will examine how Blake repurposed designs from the illuminated books, how these designs have been understood, and how else we might understand their ‘pragmatics of fragmentation and circulation in pieces’ (Goode, 5).
In the workshop part of the session compare and contrast how particular designs work within and outside the illuminated books. In 1818, Blake commented on the plates from the Book of Design he made up for Ozias Humphry around 1796: ‘Those I Printed for Mr Humphry are a selection from the different Books of such as could be Printed without the Writing tho to the Loss of some of the best things For they when Printed perfect accompany Poetical Personifications & Acts without which Poems they never could have been Executed’ (William Blake to Dawson Turner, 9 June 1818, E771). Taking this statement as a starting point, we will think about the tension between the illuminated book as a uniform medium, and the afterlives of some of the designs as individual plates. I will set the discussion going by discussing “The Book of My Remembrance” (Yale, Beinecke, Tinker 261, Butlin #261.8) in relation to The First Book of Urizen; then turn to you, asking you to comment briefly on another plate that Blake repurposed from one of his illuminated books (see list below).
The First Book of Urizen (1794): http://blakearchive.org/work/urizen
Select one of the plates listed below, for which a digital facsimile is provided.[1] Be prepared to comment on it briefly in class.
Examine the caption written underneath the relief etching, and consider how it inflects the design, what genre it evokes, and how it differs from the image’s original textual surround in the illuminated book for which it was originally composed. Prague Linguist Roman Jacobson invites us to focus on grammatical categories, including “all the parts of speech, both mutable and immutable: numbers, genders, cases, grades, tenses, aspects, moods, voices, classes of abstract and concrete words, animates and inanimates, appellatives and proper names, affirmatives and negatives, finite and infinite verbal forms, definite and indefinite pronouns or articles, and diverse syntactic elements and constructions”[2] Pay attention to the caption’s mode of address and compare it to the writing on the corresponding illuminated book page.
“Which is the Way” / “The Right or the Left”
Keynes Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum, P.20-2018, Butlin #261.1
“Death and hell” / “Team with life”
Princeton, Butlin #261.2
https://catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/99106351603506421
‘“A Flaming sword” / “ every way”’
Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1943.3.8989, Butlin #261.3 https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.11491.html
“Oh! Flames of Furious Desires’
Sir Geoffrey Keynes, Fitzwilliam Museum, Butlin #261.4
See instead: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-plate-3-of-urizen-oh-flames-of-furious-desires-n05190
‘Teach these Souls to Fly’
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-plate-2-of-urizen-teach-these-souls-to-fly-n03696
Tate Britain, Butlin #261.5
“Does the Soul labour thus” / “In Caverns of the Grave”
Beinecke, Yale University, Tinker 262; Butlin #261.6
https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/archival_objects/218479
“Wait Sisters” / “Tho All is Lost”
Keynes Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum, Butlin #261.7
“Is the Female death” / “Become new Life”
Tate Britain, Butlin #261.14
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-first-book-of-urizen-pl-17-t12998
“Eternally I labour on”
Princeton, Butlin #261.9
https://catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/99106418483506421
“I labour upwards into / futurity / Blake” (inscribed on verso)
Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, Butlin #261.10
http://corsair.themorgan.org/vwebv/holdingsInfo?searchId=5703&recCount=50&recPointer=8&bibId=122821
“Frozen door to mock” / “The World; while they within torments unlock”
Mr Joseph Holland, Los Angeles #261.11
“Who shall set” / “The Prisoners free”
Tate Britain, Butlin #261.15
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-the-marriage-of-heaven-and-hell-pl-16-t13001
“Doth God take Care of these”
Tate Britain, Butlin #261.16
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-the-book-of-thel-pl-6-t13000
“Every thing is an attempt” / “To be Human”
Tate Britain, Butlin #261.17
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-first-book-of-urizen-pl-10-t13003
“Fearless tho in pain” / “I travel on”
Tate Britain, Butlin#261.18
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-first-book-of-urizen-pl-21-t12999
“Vegetating in fibres of Blood”
Tate Britain, Butlin #261.19
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-first-book-of-urizen-pl-15-t12997
“I sought Pleasure & found Pain” / “Unutterable”
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-first-book-of-urizen-pl-6-t13002
Tate Britain, Butlin #261.20
“The floods overwhelmed me”
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-first-book-of-urizen-pl-11-t13004
Tate Britain, Butlin #261.21
„O revolving serpent“ / „O the Ocean of Time and Space“
Collection of Robert N. Essick.
Blake, Europe a Prophecy (1794): http://www.blakearchive.org/work/europe
Copy D: http://blakearchive.org/copy/europe.d?descId=europe.d.illbk.01
(Click on “supplemental views” to find the annotations)
Blake, For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1818): https://blakearchive.org/copy/gates-sexes.b?descId=gates-sexes.b.illbk.01
Blake’s words are cited from the Erdman Edition, which is digitized here: https://blake.lib.asu.edu/html/home.html (it has a helpful word-search function)
Butlin, Martin and Hamlyn, Robin, ‘Tate Britain reveals nine new Blakes and thirteen new lines of verse’, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 42:2 (2008) https://bq.blakearchive.org/42.2.butlin
Calè, L., ‘“A Dream of Thiralatha”: Promiscuous Book Gatherings and the Wanderings of Blake’s Separate Plates’, Studies in Romanticism, 59:4 (2020), 431-445.
Goode, M., ‘The Joy of Looking: What Blake’s Pictures Want’, Representations, 119 (2012), 1-36. Now also available as a chapter in Romantic Capabilities (OUP, 2020)
McGann, J., ‘The Idea of an Indeterminate Text: Blake’s Bible of Hell and Dr. Alexander Geddes’, Studies in Romanticism, 25:3 (1986), 303–24.
Phillips, Michael, video demonstration about his reconstruction of Blake’s relief etching method: https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/videos/william-blake-printing-process
Viscomi, J., ‘Illuminated Printing’, Blake Archive Gallery http://blakearchive.org/exhibit/illuminatedprinting
[1] In the case of the items from the Keynes Collection at the Fitzwilliam, and one other example, for which there are no online digital facsimiles, the listing is included because of the interest on the captions, but please choose one you can look at in digital facsimile so as to consider it as a visual-verbal artifact.
[2] R. Jacobson, “Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry (Excerpts)”, Poetics Today, 2 (Autumn 1980), 83-85.
