Late Years and John Linnell

In July 1826 William Blake was planning what to take to Hampstead. Besides a change of clothes, he proposed bringing his book of Dante drawings and a copperplate tucked inside it. The luggage would fit in a coach; the difficulty was whether his weakened body could bear the journey. He thanked John Linnell for arranging accommodation, worried about the expense, and looked forward to being with his friend’s family. Work, money, illness and affection occupy the same short letter. Together they describe the friendship that sustained much of Blake’s final decade. ^[1]

Linnell’s help reached into several parts of that life. He bought work, commissioned new projects, introduced potential customers and younger artists, and welcomed Blake into a household with children. Their relationship also included the judgement of one artist by another. Blake could ask for Linnell’s suggestions about a plate, congratulate him on professional success, or refuse an arrangement that frightened him. The letters preserve a friendship with practical obligations and room for disagreement. Their warmth grows from the things these two artists did for one another. ^{[1] [2]}

A friendship begins with an engraving

John Linnell was born in 1792, thirty-five years after Blake. When they met in 1818, the younger man was building a career as a painter and engraver. Blake had already made his major illuminated books, exhibited his paintings and spent decades working for publishers. Their acquaintance began in that professional world. In autobiographical notes later transmitted by his son, Linnell remembered visiting Blake with the younger George Cumberland at the rooms in South Molton Street. He then employed him on an engraving after his portrait of James Upton, a Baptist minister. ^[2]

Arthur Symons, printing this recollection in his 1907 study, also identifies 24 June 1818 as the first entry concerning Blake in Linnell’s journal. The evidence fixes a dated beginning for their recorded business, while the autobiographical account explains the introduction. We need not imagine the exact conversation at their first meeting. The portrait and its copperplate gave the artists something specific to work on together. A relationship later associated with biblical visions began through the ordinary division of an engraver’s labour. ^[2]

Linnell’s remembered account says that Blake had too little employment at the prices available to him. That is the testimony of someone who became a close supporter, rather than a complete statement of the older artist’s finances. It nevertheless explains why an apparently modest job mattered. Paid work could establish trust before the much larger undertakings followed. Linnell encountered Blake’s forceful opinions early and recalled trying to understand them through friendly conversation. His recollection presents listening as part of the relationship, alongside employment. ^[2]

The friendship soon included looking at art. Symons quotes journal entries recording visits together to exhibitions and, in April 1823, to the British Museum’s prints. Such outings connect Linnell’s support with Blake’s continuing interests as a maker. Prints could be studied together; paintings could be discussed; a friend might become a source of introductions as well as commissions. The older artist’s last years contained active encounters with other people’s work. ^[2]

New work through a widening circle

One introduction led to Robert John Thornton, Linnell’s doctor and the editor of a school edition of Virgil. Tate’s catalogue places Blake’s first meeting with Thornton in September 1818 and records that he was working on the illustrations by September 1820. The book appeared in 1821. For Ambrose Philips’s English imitation of Virgil’s first eclogue, Blake designed and cut seventeen wood engravings; other designs in the sequence were cut by another hand. His employment also included copperplate illustrations elsewhere in Thornton’s volumes. ^[6]

The commission offered a new material challenge within an established livelihood. Blake had extensive experience with copper, but these little pastoral scenes required cutting wood so that pale forms emerged from a printing surface carrying dark ink. Their later importance to Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert belongs to the history of the same circle. A job obtained through Linnell produced works that younger artists could keep studying. The Virgil illustrations have their own story of reduction, publication and later printing; here their importance is the connection between a paid commission and a new artistic audience. ^[6]

Linnell also wanted Blake’s responses to Milton. A later Paradise Lost project dates from 1822, distinct from the complete groups made for Joseph Thomas and Thomas Butts in 1807 and 1808. The William Blake Archive treats these as separate series. The return to an earlier subject was therefore a new transaction and a renewed engagement with familiar compositions. It should also be kept distinct from Linnell’s acquisition of the Paradise Regained watercolours. Similar names can conceal different acts of patronage. ^{[2] [7]}

The largest completed undertaking was the engraving of the Book of Job. Linnell had commissioned a second watercolour set in 1821. On 25 March 1823 he and Blake made a formal agreement for engravings: five pounds a plate, or one hundred pounds for the proposed twenty subjects, with another hundred pounds dependent on profits. The finished sequence grew to twenty-one subjects and a title page. The arrangement gave Blake a substantial project extending over several years, with defined terms as well as artistic possibilities. ^[8]

Its scale can be felt in the correspondence. In a note assigned by the editor to March 1825, Blake reports a shivering attack and sends the Pilgrims and the first two Job plates into Linnell’s care. In November he thinks he has nearly completed their agreement and invites his friend to consider further improvements. His wish for another pair of eyes sits beside his account of being confined to bed. Linnell’s role included discussing the work while helping it move towards the printer. ^[9]

A finished book still needed buyers

The Job plates carry publication lines dated March 1825, but Tate’s catalogue distinguishes those inscriptions from the completed issue in 1826. The paperwork continued after the plates had reached their finished form. On 14 July 1826 Blake signed a declaration that Linnell had bought the plates and copyright. A receipt dated the same day records one hundred and fifty pounds for the twenty-two plates and their copyright. The receipt preserves the earlier publication formula, while the documents record an actual transfer of property. ^{[8] [10]}

These details help us understand what support meant. A purchaser could provide money over the course of making a work and eventually own the means of printing further impressions. Blake received payment for demanding labour; Linnell assumed a continuing interest in the edition’s circulation. The relationship had a commercial structure even when its language was affectionate. The signed papers prevent gratitude from obscuring the rights and objects being exchanged. ^[10]

Finding buyers remained difficult. In March 1827 Blake reported that Cumberland wanted a Job set for himself but had not yet found another customer in Bristol. Cumberland’s friends apparently thought the work excessively finished. Blake’s reply to Cumberland the following month turns that criticism into a vigorous defence of distinct lines and individual judgement. Illness had not made him indifferent to the reception of his engraving, nor willing to concede that elaborate finish was a fault. ^[11]

He was still dealing with subscriptions and prices. The letters of March and April 1826 distinguish the copies intended for Henry Crabb Robinson from the proof copy requested by Butts. These are small negotiations, but they reveal an artist attentive to what a customer had ordered and what he should pay. Butts had not simply vanished when Linnell became important. The older patron called at Fountain Court, and Blake reported his decision about the Job copy to the newer one. Their circles overlapped. ^[11]

The April 1827 letter to Cumberland also explains why making another illuminated book could be expensive. Blake contrasted the house in which he had once printed with his present restricted space. A set of the Songs, priced at ten guineas, would take six months alongside his other work. Printing Jerusalem required time he valued at twenty guineas, and he doubted whether a buyer would come. These are his own estimates, made in a letter seeking sales, but their specificity matters. The remaining work demanded room, time and sustained manual effort. ^[11]

Fountain Court and Sundays at Hampstead

William and Catherine moved to Fountain Court, near the Strand, in 1821. Linnell’s account, quoted by Symons, places the move within changes in their lodging arrangements. The rooms became home and workplace together. Palmer later remembered a glimpse of the Thames and Surrey beyond the buildings visible from Blake’s window, and a welcome offered to visitors at the engraving table. The river view and the workbench belong to the same remembered interior. ^{[2] [3]}

Hampstead offered another setting. Linnell’s family lived at Collins’s Farm, North End, and Blake’s October 1825 letter to Mrs Linnell anticipates his usual Sunday visit. The note is unexpectedly comic. He had climbed into Linnell’s coach to say goodbye, become absorbed in conversation, and found himself travelling with the passengers. He persuaded the driver to let him out. Otherwise, he explains, he might have been carried towards Gloucester and missed Sunday altogether. His pleasure in recounting the mistake gives us a social voice that solemn accounts of the visionary can miss. ^[12]

The correspondence with Mrs Linnell continued. In a note tentatively dated February 1826, he reported her husband’s safe departure and conveyed Catherine’s affectionate remembrances. The concern was mutual and domestic: the time of a coach, its comfortable construction, news that would relieve someone waiting at home. Such details show the households connected through more than the delivery of drawings. Catherine appears within this exchange, although the letters do not give us a complete record of her own experience of the visits. ^[12]

Gilchrist’s later biography adds memories collected from the Linnell family: children watching for Blake’s arrival, stories told to them, songs heard or sung, and walks in the garden. These are recollections gathered decades afterwards. Their value lies in the texture they preserve, while their distance from the events should remain visible. They agree with the letters’ simpler evidence that Blake wanted to visit, knew the family closely, and took pleasure in their company. ^{[3] [12]}

He also worried about imposing on them. On 5 July 1826 he thanked Linnell for five pounds and congratulated him on the birth of another son. He urged his friend to consider his own health and household responsibilities. Eleven days later he wrote anxiously about the baby’s name, believing that the maternal grandfather should be honoured. The exchange shows how closely he felt involved in family life. Gratitude did not require silence; he could intervene with considerable urgency in a matter that concerned him. ^[13]

Faces preserved by the friendship

A lightly drawn portrait of Linnell gives the relationship another material presence. The National Gallery of Art’s graphite sheet, accession 1943.3.9016, carries Linnell’s inscription identifying it as drawn by Blake from life at Hampstead in 1825. The small head occupies a broad area of pale paper; the clothing is much more faintly indicated. An image of a person survives alongside that person’s own record of who drew him, where, and when. The separate John Linnell drawing invites closer attention to the portrait itself. ^[14]

The portraits in the other direction require a distinction. The Fitzwilliam Museum dates Linnell’s miniature of Blake, watercolour on ivory, to 1821. The National Portrait Gallery owns a replica Linnell made in 1861 from that earlier work. Its catalogue explains that C. H. Jeens’s engraving for Gilchrist’s biography wrongly gave the original miniature’s date as 1827. These are three stages: a portrait made during the friendship, a later repetition, and a published engraving. They do not all show a sitting in Blake’s final year. ^[15]

That small correction affects the larger story. A face known through a biography may seem inseparable from the account of the sitter’s death, although its source belongs several years earlier. Linnell’s continuing attachment to Blake helped preserve his appearance; subsequent reproduction also changed the circumstances in which viewers encountered it. The friendship created objects that would become evidence, and those objects retained histories of their own. ^[15]

What the younger artists found

Samuel Palmer, George Richmond, Edward Calvert and other younger admirers found encouragement around Blake. Their conversations formed part of the circle associated with the Ancients. In Gilchrist’s account, the name they used for Blake’s home came from Bunyan: the House of the Interpreter. It suggests what they hoped to find there, a place where an older artist could help them understand their own work and the art they loved. ^[3]

Palmer’s letter to Gilchrist, dated 23 August 1855, begins with an admission that particulars had become difficult to recall. That qualification belongs beside the vivid memories that follow. He describes examining antique gems, Italian prints and pictures with Blake. Admiration did not preclude criticism: Blake could object to Dürer’s handling of drapery while revering his achievement. Palmer’s recollection gives us an artist exercising judgement in company, attentive to how a garment expressed the body beneath it. ^[3]

He also remembered the effect of walking with Blake, whose conversation could transform the younger man’s experience of a landscape. The influence was personal as well as formal. Advice, looking, enthusiasm and argument passed between people before becoming something later historians could trace through pictures. Palmer’s affectionate account is itself a response to that influence, written by a mature artist remembering someone encountered in youth. Its admiration should be understood as testimony with a particular history. ^[3]

Richmond supplied Gilchrist with another remembered scene. Troubled by a period without invention, he sought Blake’s advice and found him at tea with Catherine. In the story Blake appealed to his wife about what they did when inspiration deserted them, and she answered that they prayed. It is a recollection transmitted through a later biographer, not a conversation recorded at the table. Even so, the story’s point is striking: the younger artist’s difficulty was answered by acknowledging a shared difficulty. Invention could fail the admired master too. ^[3]

These accounts need not make Blake the founder of a formal school. The visitors brought their own interests and went on to different careers. What the memories repeatedly preserve is access: time spent looking at prints, a conversation taken seriously, a welcome at the working table. Linnell’s introductions helped make that contact possible. The most lasting gift might be neither a payment nor a doctrine, but permission to persist in a kind of art a young painter scarcely knew how to defend. ^[3]

Illness and a move repeatedly postponed

By 1825 illness was interrupting Blake’s work and journeys. He described shivering attacks, stomach pain, weakness and temporary improvement. In June that year he distinguished what he could do in bed: drawing remained possible, engraving did not. That difference gave the Dante drawings a practical place during enforced rest. The letters follow changing capacities, rather than an uninterrupted heroic effort. ^[9]

The trouble also changed his relationship with Hampstead. In February 1826 he described northern air as something that had long made him ill and resisted the idea that discipline could train away his bodily particularities. His explanation belongs to his understanding of himself. We can see why journeys became a subject of negotiation without turning his account into a modern medical diagnosis. May brought another attack and another lost Sunday visit. ^[16]

The proposed longer stay in July required decisions about accommodation, expense and transport. Blake wanted the prospect of North End but asked Linnell to spare unnecessary cost. By August he proposed a cabriolet because walking to and from the stagecoach was beyond him. This was a substantial alteration for a man whom friends remembered walking between London and Hampstead. A visit now depended on how the whole journey could be managed. ^{[1] [16]}

A further plan for removal was eventually abandoned. In a letter assigned to February 1827, Blake thanked Linnell for money and discussed the Dante engravings before explaining his growing fear of the change. He had wanted the arrangement and still wished for it, yet could not undertake it. He connected that fear with his need for intellectual seclusion and referred to dreams and visions without recounting them. We have his explanation of a decision, not the means to reconstruct the experiences he withheld. ^[17]

The refusal did not end their friendship. In the same letter Blake rejoiced in Linnell’s professional success. Another note, also tentatively placed in February, describes bringing plates while out walking so that his friend could see their progress. The record moves between dependence, resistance and renewed contact. It leaves room for an older artist to need assistance while retaining authority over where he would live. ^[17]

Dante, Catherine and the last months

Blake’s shrinking movements also affected other friendships. In December 1826 he apologised to Mrs Aders for being unable to visit her and see the old-master paintings again. The social world remained attractive when his body made it difficult to enter. Letters could maintain a connection across the distance between a sickroom and a collection he wished to revisit. ^[18]

Meanwhile the Dante plates continued travelling between Blake and Linnell. In the February letter Blake requested two plates his friend held so he could improve them; in April he reported proofs taken from six and preparation for the next composition. The Dante project would remain unfinished. Here the movement of actual plates makes its continuing labour tangible. Drawings, copper, proofs and discussion connected the artist at Fountain Court with the person supporting the undertaking. ^{[17] [19]}

The April letter contains a particularly important acknowledgement of Catherine. Referring to works including Ugolino, Blake credited his wife with their existence in a finished state. His acknowledgement makes her essential to the work’s completion while leaving the nature of her intervention unstated. We cannot tell from this sentence whether she encouraged him, helped with an operation, or found another way to bring the work to completion. What survives is his own insistence on her importance. ^[19]

Money continued arriving. In January Blake apologised for failing promptly to acknowledge five pounds; in April he thanked Linnell for ten and for the prospect of a useful acquaintance with the collector William Young Ottley. He described himself as sufficiently paid if he could continue living as he did, while fearing that his work might prove unlucky for his friends. The thought gives gratitude an anxious edge. Someone else’s continued belief could be sustaining and also create a burden of concern about what they would receive. ^[19]

On 3 July 1827 he again thanked Linnell for ten pounds. A Sunday journey to Hampstead had caused a relapse; he had been yellow and experienced the return of earlier symptoms. He recognised that he could no longer travel as though young, yet hoped he was improving. The letter is brief and forward-looking. It was written by a man still assessing the next recovery, rather than composing the final scene of his biography. ^[20]

Death and the care of what remained

Blake died at Fountain Court on Sunday 12 August 1827, aged sixty-nine. J. T. Smith’s account, published the following year, describes songs addressed to God, affectionate words to Catherine, and death at about six in the evening. Smith’s narrative draws on the people around Blake; Gilchrist later identifies Catherine as the source for the account of the songs. These are close reports shaped by religious feeling, rather than a surviving record of the melodies or the complete words. ^{[4] [5]}

Gilchrist also reproduced a letter written within days of the death. Its writer described Blake’s happiness, singing and Christian hope, and invited a friend to the funeral. The letter’s language presents an exemplary departure. It shows how quickly the admiring circle understood the death through the faith they associated with his life. The testimony can be preserved without treating the reported heavenly sights as independently observable events. ^[5]

The celebrated last pictures belong to a further chain of evidence. Smith says that Tatham commissioned a coloured impression of The Ancient of Days and supplied the story of Blake judging it finished. Smith then places a sketch of Catherine after that act. Gilchrist retold both episodes with additional description. The accounts are moving, but they do not justify identifying the print as his final artwork, or imagining a securely documented deathbed portrait available for us to inspect. Smith names Tatham as his informant for the finished print; Gilchrist also records Tatham’s description of the sketch. The two episodes preserve memories of work and affection through those particular witnesses. ^{[4] [5]}

Friends attended the burial at Bunhill Fields on 17 August. Catherine then faced the practical life of the remaining drawings, printed books and plates. Gilchrist describes her staying with Linnell and later in arrangements involving Tatham, selling works and continuing some colouring. His account is retrospective and cannot assign her hand to every surviving late sheet. It does, however, show that looking after the art and finding support for its maker’s widow became closely connected responsibilities. ^[21]

Linnell’s friendship had helped Blake keep working while he lived. Its consequences continued in the preservation of pictures, plates, papers and recollections. The most revealing evidence remains ordinary in its particulars: a receipt, a request to return copperplates, a coach missed or feared, a meal offered before a journey. Through those details, the late achievement acquires human dimensions. It depended on the artist’s continued invention and on other people finding ways for that invention to go on. ^{[1] [10] [12] [16] [17] [19]}