Early Life and Apprenticeship

A crowned king stands beneath a pointed arch, one hand lifted beside his face, the other gathering his robe. The small folds, patterned borders and curling beard demand attention as insistently as the figure’s identity. This drawing of the supposed King Sebert, preserved by the Society of Antiquaries, belongs to the Westminster Abbey work associated with William Blake’s apprenticeship to James Basire. Its attribution is qualified, but its task is clear: turn an old painted monument into a legible image on paper. Looking at it brings Blake’s artistic beginnings close to the workbench. ^[1]

Blake’s early education joined several kinds of looking. Plaster casts brought ancient sculpture into a London drawing school; prints carried Renaissance figures into a boy’s collection; antiquarian commissions required the recording of medieval monuments. When he registered at the Royal Academy Schools in 1779, he already had seven years of professional training behind him. The artist who would later give bodies to angels, prophets and personified energies had learned how to describe a hand, carry a contour around drapery and organise marks for printing. ^[2][3]

The household in Broad Street

William Blake was born in London on 28 November 1757. His father, James, kept a hosiery business in Broad Street, near Golden Square, and his mother was Catherine Blake, formerly Catherine Wright. The home and shop occupied the same address, 28 Broad Street. Blake’s own late autograph statement confirms his birth date; the parish-register transcription published by Arthur Symons records his baptism at St James’s, Piccadilly, on 11 December. His own statement and the parish transcription give the childhood a securely dated beginning. ^[4][5][6]

That distinction matters because the childhood has often been made to predict the whole life. Gilchrist’s biography, first published in 1863, helped establish the picture of a visionary boy wandering out towards the fields south of London. Its famous angel-filled tree on Peckham Rye is an account of something Blake reportedly related in later years. Gilchrist even leaves his age uncertain, around eight or ten. The story can be read as part of Blake’s remembered childhood without treating its dialogue, location and spiritual experience as an independently witnessed event. ^[8]

Family religion requires similar care, although here documentary discoveries have changed the picture. Marsha Keith Schuchard and Keri Davies identified Catherine’s membership in the Moravian congregation at Fetter Lane during her first marriage, to Thomas Armitage. Their published church-book transcription records that the couple entered the congregation in November 1750 and that Catherine left after becoming a widow. Her surviving application letter expresses an intense personal devotion to Christ. These are records of Catherine’s life before William’s birth, providing something much firmer than a general label attached to the household. ^[9]

They also have a limit. Catherine’s earlier membership does not establish that William was himself a Moravian, or supply a timetable of religious lessons at Broad Street. His baptism provides evidence of an Anglican ceremony, while the family’s spiritual life cannot be reconstructed from that ceremony alone. The discoveries give his mother a history and voice of her own. They invite attention to the religious possibilities surrounding the child without turning one documented connection into a complete explanation of the adult poet. ^[9]

Casts, prints and an education in figures

The fullest early account of Blake’s artistic childhood appeared during his lifetime, in Benjamin Heath Malkin’s A Father’s Memoirs of His Child in 1806. Malkin described him entering Henry Pars’s drawing school in the Strand at ten and learning from plaster casts. He also reported James Blake buying casts and providing money for prints. His list of favourite artists includes Raphael, Michelangelo, Dürer and Giulio Romano. Written decades after these events, the account remains valuable testimony, probably informed by Blake himself. ^[3]

Its practical setting is revealing. A cast allows a student to return to the same body, move around it and study the difference between a projected contour and a rounded surface. A cast hand concentrates those problems into a small object: the bend of a finger, the joint at the wrist, the relationship between an illuminated plane and a shadow. The material can be handled and lit independently of the sculpture from which it derives. Such exercises connect the young artist with a larger European tradition of learning through the human figure. ^[3][7]

Prints offered a different encounter. They made distant works available through another artist’s translation, often at a scale and in a material quite unlike the original. Blake could study an admired figure repeatedly, taking in the organisation of limbs and garments as well as the engraved marks that represented them. Copying thus involved two connected languages: the composition inherited from the earlier artist and the linear decisions through which a printmaker made it visible. His later work would draw freely on earlier art while insisting upon the force of individual invention. ^[2][3]

Calling Blake self-taught obscures this combination of lessons, purchased study material and subsequent professional instruction. The early accounts leave much of his general education uncertain, but artistic training occupied a substantial part of his youth. Nor was his father’s trade an obvious barrier separating the household from visual culture. Myrone’s study of Blake’s Academy contemporaries finds a strong representation of families connected with commerce and design, including textile trades. He situates James Blake’s reported encouragement among other examples of parents supporting artistic careers. ^[7]

Seven years with James Basire

In 1772 Blake began his apprenticeship with James Basire at Great Queen Street, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The term continued until 1779. Basire was engraver to the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society, placing the workshop within established networks of learned publication. For Blake, this was a move from studying representations to participating in their production: making drawings and plates for readers who expected images to communicate reliable information. ^[2]

Basire’s range has sometimes disappeared behind an unflattering image of a mechanically correct antiquarian engraver. Mark Crosby’s study of the apprenticeship describes a broader practice. The workshop produced portraits, historical compositions, travel illustrations and reproductions of drawings as well as archaeological material. Different commissions required different handling. A strong architectural outline, a smoothly modelled face and an imitation of a rapidly drawn sketch were distinct technical problems. Blake’s master offered a repertoire of solutions to the question of how marks on copper could represent something seen on paper or in the world. ^[2]

Much of the work employed a combination of etching and engraving. Etching could establish lines through acid acting on exposed copper; cutting with the burin could develop or strengthen the image. Parallel strokes and intersecting networks supplied changes of tone. Spacing mattered, as did the width, direction and depth of a mark. A passage that became muddy or uneven in print could defeat an otherwise accurate drawing. These demands made sustained control of the hand part of the apprentice’s education. ^[2]

The training also extended beyond making marks. The Society of Antiquaries describes preparation of plates, reversed writing, inking, paper preparation and use of the rolling press among the skills associated with Blake’s apprenticeship. A printed sheet depended upon a sequence of operations, each capable of changing the result. The useful unit of work was consequently larger than an isolated drawing: the apprentice needed to understand how an image could pass through the workshop and emerge as a reproducible impression. ^[6]

Stories of life inside the shop are less secure than this professional framework. Malkin describes disturbances among apprentices leading Basire to send Blake out drawing. Crosby compares that recollection with the surviving apprenticeship records, which show a more complicated sequence of arrivals and departures. A later anecdote does not provide a dependable daily roster. The important opportunity it describes, work among old monuments, can be examined through surviving drawings, plates and publications as well as recollection. ^[2][3]

Recording Westminster Abbey

Westminster Abbey offered an extraordinary concentration of bodies made to endure: recumbent kings and queens, figures carved beside tombs, painted rulers and elaborate architectural settings. The commission required the apprentice to examine these things as evidence. Heads, garments, inscriptions and ornaments could matter to an antiquarian reader separately from the effect of the whole monument. An artist had to notice both the large arrangement and the detail that a smaller engraved illustration might need to preserve. ^[1][2]

The surviving drawing of Henry III in the Society of Antiquaries makes that attention tangible. The crowned figure wears a long red garment and a dark outer robe edged with small ornaments. The sceptre rises beside his face; a pale patterned lining folds across the lower body. The narrow architectural frame keeps the whole figure upright and enclosed. The record identifies ink, watercolour and gold leaf, materials that preserve differences a monochrome engraving would have to translate into marks. The museum attributes the sheet to Blake while also naming Basire and recording his signature. ^[6]

The supposed Sebert offers another richly worked arrangement. His raised hand is carefully separated from the dark background, while the other hand emerges over a broad fold of white cloth. Red and green-edged borders travel through the drapery, and the curling hair and beard give the head a distinct character. The pointed canopy repeats the enclosed shape around him. These details reward looking even before the disputed question of individual authorship is answered: the image records a painted surface with considerable attention to gesture, pattern and colour. ^[1]

The attribution needs to remain visible. Basire’s signature appears on workshop drawings and prints, while an apprentice’s participation may have taken place at several stages. The Society favours Blake on stylistic grounds. Bernard Nurse’s account for the digital edition of Vetusta Monumenta sets that position beside a more cautious reconstruction associated with Richard Goddard: Basire may have completed finished watercolours and engraved plates, even where Blake supplied preliminary work. Shared linear habits can identify a workshop practice more readily than a single hand. ^[1][6][10]

There were also separate publishing projects. Malkin’s named royal tombs chiefly relate to Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments. Another group of Abbey images was commissioned through Joseph Ayloffe and appeared in his 1780 account before being gathered into Vetusta Monumenta. Preparatory drawing, finishing, engraving and publication could be separated by years. The date of a book therefore cannot by itself date Blake’s contribution, and a sheet emerging from Basire’s workshop cannot automatically be called entirely Blake’s work. ^[2][10]

Malkin’s account of changing viewpoints helps explain the training’s significance. He describes Blake examining monuments from positions that included looking down on their figures, and treating the heads as portraits. An effigy that appears still and self-contained from one angle presents different relations of head, shoulder and garment from another. Recording it asks the draughtsman to make choices about viewpoint before deciding how to lay out the page. In this education, exact observation and imaginative selection were already closely connected. ^[3]

Practice preserved on the back of copper

A recent investigation has brought the workshop’s smallest movements into view. In 2024 the Bodleian Libraries announced the discovery of incised marks on the backs of copperplates connected with Gough’s project. Surface imaging revealed hatching, curves and small motifs that could be difficult to see under ordinary conditions. Crosby’s fuller study examines three plates and compares their marks with the linear systems used in the workshop’s finished images. ^[2][11]

Some groups look deliberately methodical: parallel strokes occupying defined areas, lines crossed at different angles, arcs and circles. They suggest the repeated testing of pressure, spacing and shape. On one plate, an array of strokes of varying lengths creates a circular form. The exercise joins two tasks at once, keeping the individual marks consistent while making their collective outline describe something else. It is a particularly direct demonstration of the labour hidden inside a finished engraved surface. ^[2]

Other marks suggest play, including a tiny face and a short arrow. Their attraction lies partly in the possibility that a young Blake made them during his apprenticeship. Crosby nevertheless retains the alternatives: another apprentice, more than one worker, or Basire himself. Similar motifs in Blake’s later work contribute to the argument without functioning as a signature. These plate backs are evidence of training in the workshop; identifying the person responsible remains a scholarly proposal. ^[2]

The work also separates an eighteenth-century exercise from its modern visibility. A modern facsimile made from the recorded surface has been printed to help examine the marks. That experiment does not show that the old plate backs were originally used for printing. Crosby argues that their marks served as practice spaces. Their survival allows a glimpse of an activity that was useful precisely because it did not yet have to succeed as a public image. ^[2]

Joseph of Arimathea and the apprentice’s own work

An early print connects this training with Blake’s continuing interest in older art. The Fitzwilliam Museum’s Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion, P.391-1985, is catalogued as the first state, dated 1773. It bears a handwritten inscription identifying the work with his beginnings at Basire’s and associating its source with Salviati after Michelangelo. The museum’s account also identifies an intermediary print attributed to Nicolas Beatrizet. Such a chain of drawings, prints and borrowed figures was a route through which an apprentice could encounter Renaissance invention. ^[12]

The object is especially useful because later versions can blur the chronology. Blake returned to the plate and added engraved wording; a familiar reproduction may show this developed state. The early date associated with the composition does not make every surviving impression an untouched example of adolescent work. Crosby compares the first and second states to show changes in the organisation of the lines. The distinction lets the apprentice’s effort remain visible without denying the mature artist’s later intervention. ^[2][12]

The later title and additions belong to the plate’s continuing life. They should not all be projected back into 1773. The apprentice’s work is already interesting on its own terms: he selected a figure from an inherited composition and learned how to carry it into copper. The object allows study, adaptation and technical ambition to occupy the same early image. ^[2][12]

Entering the Royal Academy

Blake’s formal registration at the Royal Academy Schools took place on 8 October 1779. Myrone reproduces the register’s identification of him as an engraver, aged twenty-one, with his birthday recorded as the previous 28 November. This is a useful contemporary anchor at the end of the apprenticeship. Entry to the schools was a further stage of education for someone who already possessed a trade. ^[7]

The institution gave students access to casts, a library, lectures and opportunities to draw from living models. Malkin describes Blake making many studies from the antique and drawing from life both there and at home. He also records Blake’s distaste for the latter activity. The two statements can coexist: an artist’s later judgement about an exercise does not establish that he avoided doing it. Myrone similarly warns that the small survival of academic studies cannot measure the quantity of work originally produced. Exercises were often discarded. ^[3][7]

How long Blake attended remains uncertain. Myrone presents attendance through about 1785 as a possibility, while observing that his name does not occur in the surviving later attendance records. The Academy years should consequently be described without inventing an uninterrupted course or a dramatic early departure. They placed him among artists with different ambitions and backgrounds, and within a culture that gave elevated historical and literary subjects particular prestige. His subsequent disagreements with academic taste developed from this participation. ^[7]

The Royal Collection’s drawing of Joseph and his brothers, dated about 1780–85, locates the next ambitions in that setting. Its commentary relates Blake’s historical watercolours to the examples of James Barry, Henry Fuseli and John Hamilton Mortimer. During these years, his abilities as a draughtsman could serve compositions on biblical and literary themes as well as reproductive employment. The move towards invention happened alongside the work through which he earned his living. ^[5]

Writing belonged to this transition too. The poems eventually printed as Poetical Sketches in 1783 had accumulated during his youth; the Blake Archive’s editors date their composition approximately 1769–77. Their account emphasises the variety of literary examples available to him, including Shakespeare, Milton and contemporary poetry. The volume is evidence of another education proceeding beside the visual one. It does not supply exact dates for every poem, but it prevents the apprenticeship years from being imagined as a period devoted exclusively to technical exercises. ^[13]

By 1784–85, when Blake and James Parker attempted independent publishing in Broad Street, the apprentice had become a working engraver and an Academy student, with early poems in print. This is an appropriate threshold for the larger biography. The early years had supplied materials, examples and methods from which he could make his own choices. His subsequent drawings and engravings would carry those resources into very different subjects. ^[5]

In 1799 Blake described engraving as the profession to which he had been apprenticed and expressed his willingness to live by it or by painting. That later statement gives the training its proper weight. The trade remained available to him as labour, income and a means of artistic expression. The extraordinary imaginative life did not erase the young worker’s education in making an image hold together, one observed or incised line at a time. ^[14]