SAN MARINO, CALIFORNIA.- The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens present "Vision and Verse - William Blake at The Huntington," on view through May 25, 2003. Although little known in his own lifetime, William Blake is now one of the most celebrated artists and poets in the English-speaking world. His ability to express his imaginative vision through both pictures and poems makes his talent doubly-intriguing. The Huntington has one of the world’s greatest collections of Blake’s works. The creation of the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery has made it possible to display for the first time a comprehensive selection of the Huntington Blake collection.
The son of a shopkeeper, Blake (1757-1827) spent all but three years of his life in London. When fourteen, he was apprenticed to an engraver from whom he learned the trade he pursued throughout his career, the etching and engraving of designs created by other artists. But Blake’s ambitions in the arts extended beyond commercial printmaking. He had begun to draw and to write poetry while still a boy. Finding few opportunities to publish and exhibit his works, he invented a new form of relief etching to produce, by the late 1780s, illuminated books combining words and pictures.
Illuminated printing required only a small portion of Blake’s working life. He continued to produce prints, book illustrations, watercolors, and paintings for several publishers and patrons. Most of his pictorial works have a literary basis, including his own writings, the Bible, and John Milton’s poems. In his final decade, Blake returned to traditional line engraving to execute illustrations to the Book of Job and to Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Blake’s early training as a line engraver greatly influenced all his work as an artist, for he generally favored strongly linear compositions over more painterly styles. While a student at the Royal Academy school, Blake studied classical sculpture and began to develop a neoclassical idiom, characterized by rather flat, frieze-like compositions, in his drawings and watercolors of the 1780s. At the same time, Blake’s love of gothic art, and the works of the great Renaissance artists Michelangelo and Raphael, continued to shape his sensibility. These crosscurrents of influence evolved, by the early 1790s, into Blake’s version of the sublime, a style featuring heroic figures in exaggerated poses expressive of powerful forces both physical and psychological. This style is typical of his illuminated books and color prints of the mid-1790s. Late in the period, Blake turned to painting; but rather than using oil paint, a medium he abhorred, he dissolved pigments in glue in an attempt to create pictures with a jewel-like finish.
During the first two decades of the 1800s, Blake continued to execute watercolors, characterized by radiant washes constrained within strong outlines, several large tempera paintings (all but a few now lost) for his 1809 exhibition, and commercial engravings. His final works as a watercolorist and an engraver deploy an interplay of darkness and light to symbolize the journey from despair to spiritual illumination.
The Huntington’s collection of William Blake is remarkable for its quality and diversity. The Library has an outstanding group of Blake’s illuminated books. The Art Collection houses some of his finest watercolors and pencil drawings, including three magnificent suites of watercolor illustrations to the poetry of Milton. Almost all the significant works by Blake in the collection were acquired by Henry E. Huntington between 1911 and 1923. The present exhibition honors Huntington’s wisdom and foresight as a collector.
The exhibition is divided by subject and genre into the following six inter-related sections.
