Engravings

In When the Morning Stars Sang Together, four figures lift their arms above a radiant, bearded God. Their bodies emerge from a dark field crossed by fine strokes. Below, Job and his companions occupy a cavern of curling rock. Around the central picture, little scenes of creation and carefully spaced words turn the whole sheet into an argument about the world. William Blake’s engraving gives each of these things a different texture: flesh, cloud, stone, lettering and the open light of the paper. ^[1]

The means are extraordinarily concentrated. Joseph Viscomi describes the Job plates as burin engravings made without preliminary etching. Their light and atmosphere arise from lines cut directly into copper, then printed. This is one culmination of a profession Blake practised throughout his life, alongside painting, poetry and the invention of his illuminated books. To follow his engravings is to encounter both an imaginative artist and a worker making exact decisions about tools, materials and the division of labour. ^[2]

What the burin does

A burin is a steel cutting tool with a handle that fits into the palm. Pushed through the polished surface of a copper plate, its point removes a slender curl of metal and leaves a recessed channel. The engraver controls a line’s depth and width through the tool and the pressure of the hand. A curve requires coordinated movement of tool and plate. A smooth printed stroke begins in physical resistance. ^[3]

Printing gives that cut another form. Ink enters the channels; the upper surface is wiped. Damp paper goes over the plate, and the pressure of a rolling press brings it into the recesses to receive the ink. The resulting impression reverses the engraved image. Where the plate has been cut, the sheet can carry a dark line. The metal edge may also leave an indentation, the platemark, around the image. ^[3]

This distinguishes engraving from conventional etching, where acid bites the principal lines opened through a protective ground. The two procedures can cooperate. Viscomi describes the mixed method familiar to Blake from his training: an etched design provides a foundation for further work with the burin. A museum’s description of a print as both etching and engraving may therefore identify successive operations on one plate. ^[2]

The distinction matters especially for Blake. His relief etching left protected lettering and pictures standing above surrounding copper that acid had lowered. Ink could be printed from those upper marks. The Job engravings use a different relationship between cut, ink and paper. Their words and pictures share a sheet, but that resemblance to an illuminated page does not establish that they were made by the illuminated books’ process. ^[2]

A profession learned in Basire’s workshop

Blake served his apprenticeship with James Basire from 1772 to 1779. The Morgan connects this training with his lasting commitment to line and with the professional identity by which contemporaries knew him: an engraver. The workshop gave him a means of earning money and a demanding education in how an image could be translated into a printable surface. ^[4][5]

Basire’s antiquarian work placed particular demands on accuracy. The plates for Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain reproduced medieval tombs, including monuments in Westminster Abbey. In 2024 the Bodleian announced the discovery of practice marks on the backs of copperplates associated with that work. Hatching, curves and small motifs suggest an apprentice testing tools and learning a workshop style. ^[5]

The attribution remains qualified. The Bodleian’s account identifies Blake as the most likely apprentice responsible, rather than treating the marks as securely signed works. They offer an unusual view of training: the back of a plate could preserve repeated movements that were never intended to appear in a finished print. Learning the line preceded putting it before a public. ^[5]

An early separate engraving also acquired a later life. The Morgan’s Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion carries the engraved date 1773, but its impression represents a reworked second state, dated about 1810–20. It brings the apprentice’s subject into the mature artist’s practice. A print bearing an early date may therefore preserve work done to the copper many years afterwards. ^[4]

Engraving another artist’s design

Morning Amusement, published on 10 August 1782, identifies Blake as working after Jean-Antoine Watteau. Its companion, Evening Amusement, belongs to the same early reproductive activity. The Morgan describes the pair as probably modified copies of Watteau compositions. The qualification allows room for adaptation within the professional task of carrying another artist’s invention into print. ^[17][18]

The phrase after Watteau assigns a role. It tells us whose composition supplied the basis of the image. Blake’s work lay in giving that composition an engraved form, with a system of marks capable of carrying figures, setting and tonal relationships. Reproductive engraving required decisions at every stage even when the larger arrangement had already been invented. The name of the designer and the name of the engraver answer different questions. ^[2][17][18]

Blake explained the labour unusually plainly to the Reverend John Trusler in August 1799. After defending his imaginative painting, he turned to prices. Engraving another painter’s work, he maintained, required more labour than engraving his own inventions. He quoted thirty guineas for work of the requested size and refused to accept less. Visionary conviction and professional negotiation occupy the same letter. ^[19]

His estimates belong to that negotiation, rather than to an independently measured rule of productivity. His distinction between kinds of work concerns a practical advantage: a design already possessed in the imagination could move towards execution differently from an image received from someone else. Blake nevertheless says he has no objection to engraving after another artist and identifies engraving as the profession to which he had been apprenticed. ^[19]

That statement complicates the familiar image of an isolated visionary impatient with ordinary employment. Blake could be intensely defensive about his inventions while accepting reproduction as skilled professional work. The disagreement with Trusler concerns judgement, interpretation and payment, all voiced by an artist who knew what his labour cost. ^[19]

A letter to George Cumberland of December 1795 places another conviction beside that commercial experience. Blake rejects the separation of the faculties of invention and execution: “he who can Invent can Execute.” He then gives practical instructions involving wax, a warmed plate and a feather. The claim becomes more persuasive through its company. An assertion about artistic ability leads directly to help with a material problem. ^[20]

Collaboration could also put two engravers’ hands into one plate. The Morgan’s portrait of the engraver Wilson Lowry is a second-state impression; its label explains that the fourth state credits Linnell with the drawing from life and both Linnell and Blake with the engraving. The museum connects their compatible handling with techniques Blake had learned from his younger colleague. Professional knowledge continued to pass between artists late in his career. The division of labour could be a partnership as well as an arrangement between a designer and a separate reproductive craftsman. ^[21]

Original engravings offered to the public

The prospectus of 10 October 1793 presents Blake’s own productions as a varied business. Its first offerings are a historical engraving of Job and Edward and Elinor, followed by works in illuminated printing and small books of engravings. These distinctions show the range he wanted buyers to recognise. The new illuminated method existed beside ambitions for larger independent prints. ^[22]

The advertised Job belongs to this earlier moment. It should not be confused with the suite of twenty-one subjects and a title plate engraved three decades later. A familiar biblical name can recur across separate undertakings, with different sizes, prices and publication histories. The prospectus is evidence of an offer made in 1793, not a catalogue of the later series. ^[22][6]

Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims carried the union of designer and engraver into a particularly large print. The Morgan’s third-state impression, accession 2005.190, has an engraved design about ninety-five centimetres wide. Its inscription identifies Blake as painter, engraver and publisher, with a publication date of 8 October 1810. The catalogue places this state around 1810–20. The date cut into the plate and the period assigned to its developed state therefore remain distinct. ^[23]

Blake’s own prospectus of 15 May 1809 explains the ambition behind that union. He invokes earlier masters of original engraving and argues that a painter can preserve his own characters and expressions more fully than another artist. His promise of a year’s work makes the claim practical as well as aesthetic: a definite period of skilled labour would bring the painting before subscribers in another form. The advertisement gives authorship a commercial structure of advance payment and eventual delivery. ^[24]

The procession offered a different experience from the small illustrated book: an extended company of individually characterised riders could be examined across a broad sheet. The Morgan relates Blake’s treatment to his admiration for earlier artists who engraved their own inventions. Here the print’s authorship becomes part of its public claim. He presented the translation into copper as a continuation of the picture’s invention. ^[23]

The Grave: Blake’s designs, Schiavonetti’s plates

The illustrated edition of Robert Blair’s The Grave, published in 1808, requires the opposite allocation of roles. Blake supplied the designs; Luigi Schiavonetti made the twelve illustrative plates. Sir John Soane’s Museum describes them as etchings after Blake and identifies The Reunion of Soul and Body as the title plate. Calling these pictures Blake’s illustrations is appropriate, provided it does not imply that he cut their published plates. ^[25]

The portrait is another separate contribution. Schiavonetti engraved it after Thomas Phillips’s painting of Blake. Thus the volume brings together designs by Blake, their execution by Schiavonetti, and a portrait derived from Phillips. A binding label that announces thirteen plates can count the portrait alongside the twelve illustrations. That convention does not turn the portrait into a thirteenth design by Blake. ^[25]

The Soane copy also preserves the publishing setting: subscribers included Soane and numerous Royal Academicians, while Henry Fuseli contributed remarks on the designs. The book belongs to a collaborative enterprise involving artistic endorsement, reproduction and circulation. A further edition appeared in 1813. Its date must be retained when describing that edition, even though Blake’s designs had already reached print in 1808. ^[25]

Job: a whole world made from lines

For the later Illustrations of the Book of Job, invention and engraving were again Blake’s. John Linnell formalised the commission in March 1823. The finished undertaking comprised twenty-one subjects and a title plate. Tate records both the agreement and the eventual expansion from the twenty engravings originally envisaged. The suite grew through work, rather than emerging as a fully fixed count at the outset. ^[6]

Viscomi’s technical account makes its character distinctive. Blake worked entirely with burins and amassed lines in parallel strokes, subordinating tone to line and texture. This departed from the conventional mixed method and from systems that filled the spaces between crossing lines with dots. His admiration for Dürer and other earlier engravers helped him produce a highly individual late work. ^[2]

Look closely at When the Morning Stars Sang Together. The lifted bodies are held against a densely marked background. Long strokes turn the legs and torsos; folds and strands gather around them. The pale arms form an upper rhythm, while the little stars interrupt the darker field. The bright figures acquire their force through the distribution of dark marks around and within them. ^[1]

Below, the spreading arms of God establish another horizontal movement. His beard descends towards the meeting of the cloud and cavern. The rock enclosing the human witnesses curls and thickens, with short repeated strokes giving it a material weight unlike the smooth, exposed limbs above. The same ink produces several kinds of substance because the marks change direction, length and density. ^[1]

The margins extend that variety. Small creation scenes sit beside words whose spacing allows them to remain legible at a much smaller scale than the central figures. Fine outlines separate the little compartments; roots and rocky forms join the bottom corners. A viewer can travel from a broad expanse of light to an individual letter without leaving the work of the engraved line. The page’s visual intelligence operates across these changes in scale. ^[1]

Tate identifies the six marginal scenes with the creation days in Genesis and the central subject with God’s questions to Job. Their full scriptural argument belongs to the series. Within an account of engraving, the extraordinary thing is how different kinds of information coexist: a bodily vision, miniature narrative, decorative growth and words. The burin gives each a distinct presence on one printable surface. ^[1]

Blake’s April 1827 letter to Cumberland provides a fitting companion. Thanking him for his efforts to sell Job, Blake defends the individuality of every line, whether straight or crooked. The argument is fiercely polemical, but it begins from something the engravings make accessible. Attend to one curve through a shoulder or one patterned edge of cloud, and the large spiritual subject becomes a sequence of particular decisions. ^[26]

A date and the word Proof

The Job suite also teaches a reader how much information can lie outside the pictured scene. Most plates carry a publication line dated 8 March 1825. According to Tate’s account, the finished set became available only in late March 1826. The first subject has the anomalous engraved year 1828, identified as an error. None of these printed lines automatically dates every surviving impression. ^[6]

Nor does the word Proof necessarily mean an unfinished image. Tate distinguishes working proofs, on some of which Blake experimented with the borders, from the issued sets marked with that word. It records 215 such sets, followed by 100 without it. The term can identify a marketed issue as well as a stage of testing. Its meaning depends on the particular object and its catalogue history. ^[6]

Later impressions add another date. Tate associates its own suite with the 1874 printing, on the evidence discussed in Butlin’s catalogue. That is a history of sheets produced from Blake’s copper after his death. Their designs and engraved inscriptions remain his, while the physical impressions belong to a later printing. This distinction permits a precise account of an object without diminishing its connection with the artist. ^[6]

Dante: plates still being worked

The Dante illustrations present another material situation. Seven compositions reached engraving, all from Inferno. They form a much smaller selection than the 102 drawn designs. Tate’s catalogue records lifetime proofs, the issue commissioned by Linnell in 1838, and subsequent printing. Its A00005 group is assigned to the later printing associated with 1892. An image of the lovers’ whirlwind can therefore carry several different dates according to the object under discussion. ^[27]

Blake’s letter to Linnell of 25 April 1827 catches the copperplates during their making. He had taken proofs of six and prepared the fighting devils for copper. Thanks for money and an account of his improving work stand beside his intense attachment to Dante. The letter preserves the project as a continuing activity: plates were prepared, tried and developed within a relationship of support. ^[28]

Tate identifies The Baffled Devils Fighting as noticeably incomplete and allows that Blake might have intended further work on the other plates. The survival of seven engraved compositions should therefore not be read as a declaration by him that seven were finished. The contrast with Job is useful: a completed published suite and an interrupted engraved undertaking ask different questions about proofs and later impressions. ^[27]

The Dante designs also remind us that an engraving need not be understood as a colourless substitute for its watercolour. On copper, a broad coloured passage has to find another form of articulation. The finished impression directs attention towards the relation of figures, landscape and patterned marks. Comparing the media can reveal what a composition retains, and what its passage into another material makes newly prominent. ^[2][27]

Virgil: the cut becomes light

Wood engraving changes the behaviour of the cut. It is a relief process: ink rests on the upper surface, while an incised channel can remain uninked and appear as a pale line. Wood engravers use burins to organise these light marks within a dark field. The same broad family of cutting tools can therefore serve a printing relationship opposite to intaglio copper engraving. ^[29]

The distinction also separates Blake’s Virgil illustrations from his relief-etched books. Wood engraving removes material mechanically from a wooden block. Relief etching uses acid to lower exposed metal around a protected design. Both can print from raised surfaces, but that shared principle does not make wood engraving an acid process or an illuminated copper page a woodcut. ^[2][29]

Thornton’s Pastorals of Virgil, published in its third edition in 1821, placed Blake’s small wood engravings within a schoolbook. Princeton identifies the immediate text for these scenes as Ambrose Philips’s Thenot and Colinet, an English imitation of Virgil’s first eclogue. That intervening poem matters. A subject can belong to a book bearing Virgil’s name while illustrating a later English pastoral within it. ^[30][31]

Princeton’s Colinet’s Fond Desire Strange Lands to Know, accession x1938-58 i, is only 3.8 by 7.7 centimetres. A walking figure with a staff occupies the left; a milestone rises nearer the centre. A road bends into the darkness at the right, beneath hills and a sparsely marked sky. The small scene has an immense reach because the pale route continues beyond the traveller into a landscape largely held in black. ^[30]

Its marks behave differently from those in Job. Short pale flecks animate the hillside. Longer strands run across the sky and road. The traveller’s clothing is picked out by lights within the dark body, while the milestone interrupts the ground as a solid, pale shape. A few changes in the direction and spacing of white marks establish distance, movement and the difference between earth and cloth. ^[30]

The scale deserves to remain present when viewing an enlargement. What appears spacious on a screen was a narrow image embedded in a reading book. The Met’s Thenot Remonstrates with Colinet, Lightfoot in the Background, accession 32.1.2, measures 3.7 by 7.3 centimetres at the block and is catalogued as a second state. These were intensely worked little surfaces, and different surviving objects preserve different stages of their history. ^[31]

The Morgan’s account of four designs printed from one block extends that history. It records Linnell’s purchase of Blake’s blocks in 1825 and their printing by Edward Calvert, followed by further family printings. It also identifies Calvert among the younger artists who valued these pastoral images. Their force continued through looking, collecting and renewed printing from the wood itself. ^[32]

The blocks also changed before they entered the schoolbook. Tate explains that several designs were cut together on a block, then separated and reduced to make room for captions in the book’s arrangement. An uncut proof and a published illustration can therefore preserve different extents of the design. Later reproductions introduce another distinction: Geoffrey Keynes’s 1937 edition used electrotypes made from the rediscovered blocks. These metal duplicates carried the designs through another printing surface. ^[33]

Tate’s frontispiece A00111 is catalogued as an impression probably printed by Calvert after Blake’s death. Its T02115 belongs instead to the British Museum’s 1977 printing from the original woodblocks. The catalogue reports that the later printing revealed details and tonal gradations less apparent in earlier impressions. A later date does not automatically mean less visual information; the condition, inking and printing of a particular surface matter. The project’s 1821 date cannot date every sheet that carries its designs. ^[33][34]

Looking from the line to the maker

Begin with a small comparison. In Job, follow a dark stroke turning a body against pale paper. In Colinet, follow a pale stroke opening a garment or a path within black. Both belong to Blake’s practice as an engraver, yet their light comes from different uses of the printing surface. Recognising that difference makes the images more immediate: the eye can begin to follow the decisions that produced what it sees. ^[1][30]

Then read the names and dates around the picture. They may identify Blake as inventor, engraver or publisher, another artist as designer, or another craftsman as the maker of the plate. They may also preserve an old publication date within a much later sheet. Engraving makes an image repeatable, but its history remains particular. Blake’s art becomes richer when the imagined world and the material object can be held together. ^{[17][6][23][25]}