William Blake exhibition takes place at The Ashmolean

‘An individual like no other, William Blake is hard to place. Even today when he is revered — unlike in his own day when he was thought mad by some, a genius by others — the artist, engraver, visionary, poet, revolutionary, who has been described as “Albion’s strangest genius” remains one of the least understood of English artists. So, how does one begin to understand the strange artistic sensibility of William Blake (1757–1827)?

Well, as Blake scholar Michael Phillips, curator of the Ashmolean’s exhibition William Blake: Apprentice & Master says, “nothing can tell us more about a work of art than the discovery of how it was made”.

That is the approach this fascinating exhibition takes. It looks at how Blake came to be Blake the artist, tracing three areas of his achievements: how he evolved as an artist; how by the 1790s he had developed into a technically adventurous printmaker at the height of his powers; and, in his final years, inspired a younger generation of artists, such as Samuel Palmer, George Richmond and Edward Calvert, known as the ‘Ancients’.

Featuring more than 90 renowned works by Blake, the exhibition starts with the sort of prints the young Blake, dubbed the “little connoisseur” would have sought at auction to collect and copy, a Rowlandson etching showing the mayhem of a print sale, and a painting of Covent Garden market where he roamed.

The stage is thus set. Blake is already sketching prodigiously, encouraged by his parents, and by the age of fourteen apprenticed to James Basire, official engraver to the Society of Antiquaries, and sent out to study London’s Gothic churches, a formative experience for his later style.

The first room is arranged to reflect this world of precision and antiquar-ianism. Small dim-lit bays (low lit for conservation reasons as much as atmosphere) give us Sepulchral Monuments, great tomes open at pages showing kings and queens — intense full-face portraits prefiguring Blake’s future works — and his RA training and drawings revealing both his proficiency and preference for outline over the light, shade and tone favoured by contemporaries. We get to know Blake through the eyes of his young wife — her pencil sketch of 1785 — through lines written in his sloping hand, his attempts at mirror writing, and a copy of the most famous of his illuminated books, Songs of Innocence, open at Holy Thursday with his tiny illustrations of “The children walking two & two in red & blue & green.” But it’s at the close of this opening room that we truly begin to recognise Blake’s power as an artist — his unforgettable black-and-white etching after Henry Fuseli’s Head of a Damned Soul, where gaping mouth, upturned face and eyes showing only whites, tell us all we need to know of a man in torment.

The second room explores the efflorescence in the 1790s of Blake’s complex creativity and printing innovations, including the relief etching used for his illuminated books. Works of unrivalled originality are everywhere to see — notably Europe: a Prophecy (including reworked coiled serpent title pages), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (don’t miss Blake’s furious annotations), Songs of Innocence and Experience, and his large colour prints finished in watercolour, Nebuchad- nezzar and Newton among them.

The room’s showpiece is a reconstr-uction of Blake’s studio in Lambeth complete with wooden roller press, made using floor plans discovered by Phillips, a printer himself. Philip Pullman, president of the Blake Society, said the reconstruction gave a sense of “the extraordinary labour and toil that went into every finished print”. This type of press was old-fashioned in Blake’s day. “It must have been a real struggle to use,” said Pullman.

Aside from highlights such as copies of Blake’s beguiling illuminated books combining poetry, prose, and illustration (simplicity and complexity too), which remind us that incomparable poet as he was, Blake was above all a visual artist. Don’t miss in the final room the wonderful set of tiny illustrations of Virgil’s Pastorals, Blake’s brilliant Dante illustrations, his Laocoön engraving (the figures surrounded by aphorisms — Blake told Palmer: “You will find my creed in there”), and the works by the ‘Ancients’ who had absorbed something of Blake’s visionary spirit. The Ashmolean exhibition keeps to its brief: to trace Blake’s evolution “from apprentice to master, poet to artist printmaker”. In so doing, it reminds us that, incomparable poet as Blake was, he was first and foremost an incomparable visual artist.

In the New Year there is another Blakeian feast to look forward to — the Inspired by Blake Festival, from January 16-31, in partnership with Blackwell’s of Oxford.

William Blake: Apprentice & Master
Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont St, Oxford
Until March 1
Visit ashmolean.org