Blake felt that imaginative insight was the only way to cast off the veil thrown over reality by rational thought, claiming that "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." Above all else, Blake scorned the contemporary culture of Enlightenment and industrialization, which stood for a mechanization and intellectual reductivism which he deplored. Like his peers in the world of Romantic literature - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelly - Blake stressed the primacy of individual imagination and inspiration to the creative process, rejecting the Neoclassical emphasis on formal precision which had defined much 18th-century painting and poetry. Blake was perhaps the quintessential Romantic artist.When Blake died, in a small house in London in 1827, he was poor and somewhat anonymous today, we can recognize him as a prototype for the avant-garde artists of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose creative spirit stands at odds with the prevailing mood of their culture. Through his prints, paintings, and poems, Blake constructed a mythical universe of an intricacy and depth to match Dante's Divine Comedy, but which, liked Dante's, bore the imprint of contemporary culture and politics. His lack of commercial success meant that Blake lived his life in relative poverty, a life in thrall to a highly individual, sometimes iconoclastic, imaginative vision. Overlooked by his peers, and sidelined by the academic institutions of his day, his work was championed by a small, zealous group of supporters. But all these books were sold in very small numbers, copies of each edition differently compiled and coloured.Though he is perhaps still better-known as a poet than an artist, in many ways William Blake's life and work provide the template for our contemporary understanding of what a modern artist is and does. #WILLIAM BLAKE ZITATE SANDKORN FULL#Further small books, Los, Urizen, and Ahania, retellings of the Old Testament, were full of strong images, and 12 large individual prints, with some of his most famous images such as Newton, followed in the mid-1790s. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America and Europe, three further books of prophecy from 1793 to 1794, were based on Blake's views that the French and American Revolutions were the precursor of the Final Judgement of mankind and that America was the embodiment of political and spiritual liberty. Songs of Innocence was followed by The Book of Thel, one of Blake's works of prophecy, and in 1790 by The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, an attack on the Christian mystic Swedenborg and an account of Blake's own spiritual and artistic struggles. Here are the title pages for Songs of Innocence and of Experience /LWnLxTwAzF William Blake was born #onthisday in 1757. The first successful work of this kind was the Songs of Innocence (1789), to which was later added Songs of Experience (1794). The death of Blake's father allowed him time to develop a printing technique that enabled him to combine his visionary texts and images on one printing plate. A continuing theme of his work was the conflict between rulers and their people, a radicalism that coincided with the period of the French Revolution. Blake shared the artistic establishment's view that art should address great historical, religious and philosophical subjects. In the 1780s he also exhibited several apocalyptic subjects at the Royal Academy. There he befriended some of the leaders of the neoclassical movement, such as John Flaxman and Thomas Stothard.īlake's personal artistic vision clashed with his work as a reproductive engraver and he was beginning to achieve a reputation as poet – Poetical Sketches was published in 1783. William Blake (1757–1827) Paintings Collectionīlake entered the Royal Academy schools in 1779, but he disliked life drawing, preferring classical sculptures and Greek vase paintings. Our Lady with the Infant Jesus Riding on a Lamb with Saint John
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