Drawings

Two men pause beneath enormous trees. Around them, branches divide into fine, searching lines; dark wash gathers in the passage ahead; a little blue settles into one man's robe. In William Blake's Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest, the image remains visibly in the making. Some contours have been reinforced, others remain pale, and much of the paper still carries only the lightest indication of colour. Yet the meeting of the figures and the enclosing movement of the wood are already clear. Drawing lets us see how Blake gives an imagined scene its structure. ^[1]

His drawings include careful pen studies, lightly worked graphite heads, developed compositions in grey wash and luminous watercolours. Their purposes differ. One sheet tests an arrangement that he will abandon; another supplies the basis for a print; another has the presence of an independent picture. Looking at them together reveals a practical artist selecting, revising and carrying an invention between materials. It also gives substance to Blake's own insistence that drawing belonged at the centre of painting. ^[2]

Learning to draw and learning to invent

Blake's professional training began with the engraver James Basire, to whom he was apprenticed in 1772 for seven years. The Society of Antiquaries preserves drawings associated with his work recording monuments in Westminster Abbey. Its account connects seven of its nine sheets with engravings published in Vetusta Monumenta. The Society attributes the drawings to Blake on stylistic grounds, while noting that they are not autographed by him. Its records for the Sebert and Henry III sheets transcribe “Basire. del.” and suggest that Basire signed drawings made by Blake during the apprenticeship. These were exercises in recording objects accurately for another material and another audience. ^[3]

That apprenticeship offers a useful beginning for understanding the later visionary artist. A monumental effigy has a particular disposition of limbs, folds and architectural ornament. Making a drawing for an engraver requires deciding which edges carry that information. The Society identifies the study of Gothic effigies as an important influence on Blake's later art. Butlin makes a specific connection between the recumbent bodies in the early House of Death and Blake's studies of Gothic tombs. The monument becomes a resource for an invented scene of suffering. ^{[3] [4]}

Blake entered the Royal Academy's drawing schools in 1779. An early sheet in the Royal Collection, RCIN 913599, places his subsequent biblical invention in that period of developing independence. Dated about 1780–85 and made in pen, ink and wash, it carries Joseph Discovering Himself; the Brethren Alarmed on one side and Benjamin Accepted as a Hostage on the other. The collection relates such work to Blake's ambitious historical watercolours and to the example of James Barry, Henry Fuseli and John Hamilton Mortimer. Training and invention were developing together. ^[17]

On the Joseph side, pale garments and bodies stand out against a broad grey ground. A figure bends down at the left; the people at the right respond through lifted palms, turned faces and bodies stretched along the floor. The wash gives the group a shared space, while the ink separates one gesture from the next. Turn the sheet over and the standing figure becomes more upright, receiving a person who reaches upwards. The cluster on the right draws its heads and hands inward. Across the two images, Blake changes the emotional relation through the angle and reach of the bodies. The economical backgrounds leave those exchanges unusually exposed. ^[17]

A double-sided sheet also asks us to imagine an object handled and turned. The modern reproduction usually gives one image its own rectangle, but the paper could carry more than one subject and more than one stage of thought. Blake's later sheets make this particularly clear: a visionary head may have another study behind it, while a biblical composition can share its support with an alternative group of angels. Reading the whole object changes the questions we ask of the single image. ^{[5] [18]}

Blake's own account of his practice was fiercely independent, but it allowed for study and reconsideration. In a letter to Thomas Butts of 22 November 1802, he reported two years spent investigating light, shade and colour. He defended the drawings and pictures already made for his patron while explaining that he had returned to his ideas as though he were a learner. The confidence of the letter grows out of an argument with himself about the effects his subjects required. ^[19]

In the same letter he distinguished portraiture, which he believed required nature before the eye, from historical invention. That is Blake's artistic position, not a universal rule about making pictures. It does help explain the concentrated bodies in his imagined scenes. A figure has to make an action legible: a guiding hand, a head bowed towards water, a shoulder withdrawn from another person. Drawing gives the conception a bodily form that can be tested before every part of the surface is finished. ^[19]

Graphite, ink and the colour of the paper

The simplest material distinction is often the most helpful. Tate's Head of the Ghost of a Flea, dated about 1819, is graphite on paper. The earlier House of Death combines graphite, ink and watercolour. The late Dante River of Light uses graphite and watercolour. These descriptions identify different kinds of mark on particular sheets; they keep the broad word drawing from concealing the artist's varied handling. ^{[4] [5] [6]}

In the flea's head, a pale, granular line establishes a high forehead, a heavy eye and a strongly projecting mouth. A separate study of the open mouth sits below. Much of the page is untouched. The image depends on the relation of a few concentrated passages to the surrounding paper: the eye carries an intensity that the lightly indicated back of the head does not need. It is possible to follow an invented face into being without the enclosing atmosphere of a finished painting. ^[5]

In Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest, line and wash divide the work differently. Dark, tapered contours mark the tree trunks and some branches, while lighter lines remain visible beside them. Broad grey passages collect between the trees. The small figures occupy an opening near the centre, enclosed by trunks whose curves seem to lean towards one another. The scene's scale emerges through the contrast between the people and these great bending forms. ^[1]

Tate's account identifies blue and green washes in the sunny regions and carbon black in the wood ahead. Those materials make a change in atmosphere visible without requiring every leaf to be coloured. At the right, fine branches remain exposed across a pale trunk; behind the figures, the wash darkens into a more continuous mass. The sheet rewards looking between its different degrees of completion. The darker passage and the delicate network of branches offer different ways of giving the wood depth. ^[1]

A monochrome reproduction can obscure these relationships. Grey ink wash and graphite may look similar at a small scale, although the collection record distinguishes their presence. Conversely, a coloured image can still show the underlying work of drawing quite clearly. On Blake's sheets the turn of a body, the edge of a garment and the boundary between figures often remain legible through the colour. The useful question is what each material is doing in the particular image. ^{[1] [4] [6]}

Blake gave that question a theoretical force in his Descriptive Catalogue of 1809. He argued that the merit of a painting and a drawing shared the same foundation, and defended the expressive power of definite outline. His “bounding line” distinguished one face, animal or tree from another. The contention was part of a public defence of his own art, expressed with extravagant hostility towards painters he opposed. Its lasting usefulness lies in the invitation to look at the particular shape through which an image acquires character. ^[2]

A drawing can change its mind

The two versions of The House of Death offer a compact lesson in revision. Tate dates the drawing N05192 to about 1790. It is a developed composition in graphite, ink and watercolour, with the suffering bodies crowded towards the right and Despair standing at the left. Death enters diagonally from above. Firm contours, pale bodies and surrounding wash make the image sufficiently resolved to be considered as a picture in its own right. ^[4]

The later colour print, N05060, is related to it in reverse, but Blake also changes the action. Despair's extended gesture becomes a bowed, lowered stance; Death acquires a broad, centred reach across the top. Butlin notes the omission of a recumbent pair and the greater changes to Death and Despair. Comparing the two makes revision visible as a redistribution of force. The earlier design pushes its figures across the space; the print subjects the gathering to a more encompassing presence above. ^{[4] [20]}

The drawing therefore preserves an earlier solution, with its own expressive balance. It also has a physical history: Butlin records damage and repairs, particularly in the upper left. Its present surface cannot be treated as an untouched record of Blake's hand. The comparison is most rewarding when both things remain in view—the artist's changed conception and the survival of two distinct objects. ^[4]

Visionary heads: a face and a separate problem

Blake's visionary heads are closely associated with John Varley. Tate's catalogue describes the small Blake–Varley sketchbook as a book first used by Varley for landscape sketches and subsequently by Blake for heads drawn in 1819. The Head of the Ghost of a Flea is now a separate leaf, measuring 189 by 153 millimetres. Its 1806 watermark dates the paper, not the drawing. The object brings a highly unusual subject into the ordinary material circumstances of a sketchbook and a pencil. ^[5]

The separate mouth is the telling detail. It allows the artist to retain one expression in the main head while exploring another elsewhere on the sheet. Its position below, larger and more isolated, gives the opening of the jaws a presence of its own. The upper profile is held together by an almost continuous sweep from forehead to nose and lips; the lower study breaks that continuity apart. Looking between them turns an exotic subject into a precise question about how a face changes when it moves. ^[5]

Varley's Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy, published in 1828, supplies the famous explanation. He reported that Blake began the separate study when the apparition opened its mouth, and continued the first head when it closed again. Varley took this conduct as evidence that Blake had an image before him. The drawing preserves two treatments of the mouth; Varley's text tells us how he understood the circumstances. The distinction lets us attend seriously to both the sheet and the historical account. ^[21]

Varley's interest also shaped what followed. Tate records that John Linnell engraved two complete heads for the Treatise, one with the mouth shut and one open. The sketch thus entered a chain of selection and reproduction: a separate detail on a sheet could be developed into a complete printed head. A reader looking at the book's engraving encounters a new arrangement of information from the drawing. The drawn and printed lines belong to related but different objects. ^[5]

Allan Cunningham's 1830 biography adds stories of other visionary sittings, including William Wallace interrupted by Edward I. In that sequence Cunningham recounts what a friend told him, then describes being shown drawings. His passage gives a vivid sense of heads discussed, named and displayed within a circle of interested viewers. J. T. Smith's earlier account treats the flea chiefly as a personification and describes its appearance. Neither author supplies a neutral transcript of every sitting. Their differing emphases belong to the history through which Blake's drawings became known. ^{[22] [23]}

The sheet's reverse adds another layer. Butlin identifies a profile and a reduced drawing of Milton's First Wife, with colour notes in Varley's hand. He suggests that the smaller version allowed observations to be recorded without marking the fuller drawing that originally faced it. That proposal reveals a practical use for duplication: a drawing could provide a place to annotate another drawing. The small book held discussion and comparison as well as images. ^[5]

Dante: drawing at several speeds

Blake's Dante illustrations are especially useful for following how a design develops. The Forest sheet belongs to the series of 1824–27 and illustrates the end of Inferno II, when Dante accepts Virgil's guidance and enters the wooded way. Reading that passage sharpens the encounter between the two figures. Their relationship has to carry the moment of renewed purpose, while the trees establish the difficulty of the journey beginning around them. ^{[1] [7]}

The drawing's incompletion exposes the distribution of that work. The pair of figures already provides a centre; the surrounding forest alternates between articulated branches, reinforced trunks and thin wash. This gives the eye several possible routes into the image. Follow the branches and the space becomes tangled; follow the figures and the opening becomes a passage. The design does not need uniform finish for those relations to operate. ^[1]

Dante in the Empyrean, Drinking at the River of Light, Tate N03370, offers a different balance. The sheet is upright, 528 by 371 millimetres, and the river runs through its centre. Dante kneels low at the left, his body bent towards the water; Beatrice sits opposite. Above them, much larger forms rise into pale areas of the paper. Tate catalogues the materials as graphite and watercolour, allowing the contrast between the fine drawn scheme and the more developed coloured passages to remain central to our looking. ^[6]

The most insistent colour gathers around Dante's back and robe and among the flowers at the lower left. His bent arm and extended hands direct attention towards the stream. Across the water, the seated figure has more colour and modelling than many of the faint surrounding forms. The lower encounter is therefore legible within a much larger conception whose upper reaches remain lightly indicated. The sheet shows how Blake could develop selected areas while retaining the whole arrangement. ^[6]

Dante's Paradiso XXX describes a stream of light between flowering banks, with living sparks rising and returning to it. The poet must drink before his vision can become clearer. Blake's bending figure makes that transformation physical: knowledge involves a movement of the body towards the water. The pale central channel can be read in relation to the poem's radiance, but the lightness of this particular sheet also belongs to its unfinished working state. The image offers both an imaginative place and material evidence of work in progress. ^{[6] [7]}

Butlin identifies further activity on the left above Dante: an aged poet and a scene of painting and engraving. His catalogue reports Albert S. Roe's interpretation of Art and Nature raised into eternity, while Tate's more recent caption presents the identification tentatively. Even without assigning every figure a name from Blake's mythology, the movement between the kneeling poet and the small acts of making above him is suggestive. A drawing about transformed vision contains the arts through which vision acquires a form. ^[6]

Comparing these sheets with the more extensively coloured Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car gives another useful point of reference. In that watercolour, blue, red and yellow circulate through the great wheel and the figures, while fine contours continue to distinguish faces, hands and the gryphon's feathers. The contrast reveals how much the two lighter sheets have established already. Their compositions are substantial achievements even where colour remains sparse. It would be misleading to imagine every faint area as a separate undeveloped idea. ^[24]

An alternative that Blake set aside

A late Job drawing makes the provisional nature of composition still clearer. In Every Man also Gave Him a Piece of Money, about 1821–23, Job and his wife sit centrally, with visitors approaching from both sides. God and angels sweep above in a vigorous oval. The scene is built from a contrast between the seated pair's stability and the circling movement overhead. The recto combines graphite, ink and watercolour; the drawing remains lightly worked enough for the enclosing curves to stay visible. ^[18]

Butlin identifies it as an alternative upright arrangement for the nineteenth Job design. Blake explored that solution further, yet ultimately returned to an oblong composition for the engraving. The sheet is valuable because it preserves a considered possibility that he did not choose. An imaginative project could proceed by developing an alternative far enough to judge its effect. The surviving drawing gives that decision a shape we can still examine. ^[18]

Its colour also needs care. A previous owner described gold and rose behind the earthly group, but Tate's conservation department could detect no trace of those colours; blue remained. Butlin leaves the discrepancy unresolved. That caution is useful whenever a Blake drawing appears faint: the present appearance can involve unfinished work, altered materials and imperfect historical descriptions in different combinations. The evidence for one sheet should guide our account of that sheet. ^[18]

Following the drawings further

A rewarding way into Blake's drawings is to keep a small group of exact objects beside one another. Tate's collection entries for the Forest, River of Light, flea head and Job alternative provide different examples of line, colour and degree of finish. The Royal Collection's Joseph sheet extends the inquiry into the early career, while the Society of Antiquaries supplies the context of monument copying. Each collection offers a different route through a practice too varied to be represented by a single characteristic sketch. ^{[1] [3] [17] [5] [18] [6]}

For further study, Martin Butlin's The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake remains a major cataloguing reference, and his Tate catalogue supplies detailed discussions of many of the objects considered here. The William Blake Archive offers editorial resources and collection lists as another entrypoint. Such resources are most useful when approached with a particular question: whether a sheet has a reverse, whether a design was revised, or whether the image being compared is a drawing or a printed impression. ^[25]

Begin with the mouth studied separately, the tree reinforced in ink, or the upright composition eventually set aside. Those small decisions give access to Blake's imagination through the labour of making it visible. His drawings allow us to follow the moment when a body finds its gesture, a scene acquires its proportions and an idea remains open to change.