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William Blake , engraver
British, 1757 - 1827
Wilson Lowry, 1824
Engraving
25.5 x 18.5 cm (image)
Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts 1963.30.3056

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after, John Linnell, the Elder

Artist Credit: all

Artist Biography: Engraver, etcher, lithographer, watercolorist, visionary poet. The son of a clothier, Blake demonstrated a marked artistic bent at a very young age, and at ten was sent to begin his studies at the Paris Academy in the Strand. At fourteen he was apprenticed to the fashionable engraver, Ryland, but spent the years 1771-1778 apprenticed to James Basire. Basire often sent Blake to copy the funerary sculptures of Westminster Abbey and the old churches of London - and it may be that the long hours spent in dimness and isolation greatly (and perhaps morbidly) enhanced his innate sympathy with the supernatural. On the termination of the seven-year apprenticeship, Blake studied for a short time at the newly-established Royal Academy. With the exeption of his brief period of study in Paris, Blake never went abroad, and had no contact with artistic life save that of Georgian London. He drew his inspiration from the most mystical of texts, including the Bible, Dante, Milton, and Ossian. The strangeness of his work has always made it difficult to clearly situate Blake in the history of art.