John Linnell (Drawing)

John Linnell turns slightly towards the left of William Blake’s drawing, his eyes open beneath gently arched brows. The face is immediately readable, although the marks that establish it are remarkably pale. Below the chin, a high collar and the sweep of a coat spread into the surrounding paper. Much of the sheet remains empty. The drawing brings a familiar person into view with very little material. ^[1]

The National Gallery of Art in Washington dates this graphite portrait to 1825. It belongs to the Rosenwald Collection and measures 35.7 by 23.8 centimetres overall. In the lower right corner Linnell himself identified the artist, sitter, place and year. His note anchors an image whose delicacy might otherwise make it seem elusive. Here Blake, so often encountered through imagined worlds and extraordinary bodies, gives sustained attention to the features of another working artist. ^[1]

A face held by a few lines

Linnell’s head is shown in three-quarter view. Both eyes are visible, with the farther eye appearing close to the left edge of the face. The nose projects in that direction, while the nearer ear opens clearly on the right. These unequal intervals establish the turn without a heavy shadow dividing the head. Blake allows the reader to understand its volume largely through the placing of the features. ^[1]

Look first at the brows and eyelids. They give the upper face more definition than the broad area of forehead above them. Small differences in the curves of the two eyes keep the face from becoming a symmetrical diagram. The nose has a firmer lower edge, while the lips are closed and lightly separated. Beneath them the chin comes forward in a rounded contour. The drawing remains spare, but its attention is distributed precisely enough for these features to work together. ^[1]

The hair receives a different kind of line. Loose curves rise above the forehead and turn across the crown; smaller curls approach the temple and ear. Blake records their direction without filling the whole mass with graphite. This open treatment keeps the hair connected to the sheet’s light surface. The face is framed by movement, yet it retains the clearest concentration of marks. ^[1]

The expression may strike a viewer as calm or attentive. Such impressions arise from the open eyes, closed mouth and unforced angle of the head. They cannot tell us what Linnell was thinking. Even the direction of his attention remains less certain than the direction in which his face turns. We can describe an alert presence without making the portrait prove a particular conversation or a private state of mind.

The coat and the space around it

The clothing gives the head a substantial support. A high collar climbs towards the ear and follows the lower jaw. Below it, long diagonal lines describe the front of the coat, while the shoulder curves down towards the right. The broad forms make the body easy to recognise, although they carry little internal detail. There are no hands, tools or studio objects to redirect attention towards Linnell’s occupation. ^[1]

This difference between head and coat is central to the experience of the sheet. At the face, the eye pauses over a lid, a nostril, the corner of a mouth. Across the clothing it travels more quickly, following a few extended contours. The portrait therefore contains different degrees of description within one figure. Its visual centre emerges through the relative density of the marks, without needing a dark background or a sharply enclosed silhouette.

The margins matter too. The top of the hair sits well below the upper edge; the lower portion of the sheet contains a large expanse of unworked paper. The writing occupies a separate area towards the lower right. Seen whole, the drawing feels different from a tightly cropped reproduction of the head. The surrounding space makes the pencilled presence appear especially fragile and gives the small inscription a visible role in the composition. ^[1]

The pale appearance invites care in describing the work. Its present image does not establish how long Blake spent drawing, the pressure of every stroke, or how the sheet looked when new. Nor does the lightly indicated coat explain why he stopped at this degree of detail. The contrast between a more articulated face and a slighter body is visible; an interrupted sitting or an intended later painting would require further evidence. The surviving sheet is already rewarding to look at on its own terms.

What Linnell wrote

The National Gallery identifies the lower-right inscription as Linnell’s handwriting. It reads: “at Hampstead / Drawn by MrBlake / from life 1825. / intended as The Portrait / of J. Linnell”. The words belong to the sitter’s account of the picture. They are particularly valuable because they name the relationship between the person represented and the person making the marks. ^[1]

Each part of the note does a distinct job. Hampstead gives the encounter a place. The attribution names Blake. The statement that the drawing was made from life identifies observation of the living sitter as its basis. The year supplies a date, while the final words identify whom the image was intended to represent. Their phrasing calls attention to the attempt involved in portraiture: here the person represented had his own voice on the page.

The tone of that phrase should remain open. The phrase about intention might sound affectionate, dryly humorous or merely descriptive to different readers. It does not securely establish Linnell’s dissatisfaction with the likeness. Likewise, the inscription records 1825 as the year of the drawing without independently telling us when Linnell added his note. The encounter and its written identification are connected, but their exact interval is unknown.

There is an unusual balance of authority here. Blake supplied the likeness; Linnell supplied the identification by which later viewers can understand it. The sitter is both subject and witness. The sheet preserves his face and his judgement that this was Blake’s attempt to portray him, giving the portrait a documentary intimacy beyond the visible features alone.

Blake on drawing a likeness

Blake had considered the demands of portraiture long before this encounter. Writing to Thomas Butts on 22 November 1802, he explained his delay in completing a miniature promised to Mrs Butts. He drew a forceful distinction between painting a portrait with the subject present and inventing a historical composition. For the former, direct access to nature was essential; for the latter, he insisted on the independence of imaginative design. The argument arose from a practical difficulty in producing a satisfactory likeness. ^[12]

This earlier letter helps us take the Linnell portrait seriously as an act of looking. Blake’s imaginative art did not prevent him from recognising the particular obligations involved in representing someone’s face. Nevertheless, the letter concerns portrait painting in 1802, and the Linnell sheet is a graphite drawing made more than twenty years later. His statement offers a useful context for the inscription’s emphasis on life, without becoming a description of exactly how he worked in Hampstead. ^{[1] [12]}

The drawing itself shows what such attention can achieve with a modest vocabulary of marks. The separate curves of eyebrow, lip and ear make the face specific while leaving much of the paper untouched. It is an instructive example within Blake’s drawings: the artist’s range includes the close observation of a friend alongside the invention of figures for poetry, scripture and vision.

An artist looking at another artist

Linnell was a painter of portraits and landscapes, as well as a supporter of other artists. The Fitzwilliam Museum dates his friendship with Blake from 1818 until Blake’s death in 1827 and identifies his commissions and purchases as important to the older artist’s later career. By 1825 their acquaintance had therefore developed over several years. The person facing Blake on this sheet already understood the practical and imaginative demands of making pictures. ^[13]

Their surviving correspondence supplies a more immediate setting. In October 1825 Blake wrote to Mrs Linnell at Collins’s Farm, North End, Hampstead, and anticipated seeing her on Sunday morning as usual. The words establish an ordinary pattern of visits during the year named on the drawing. They make Hampstead part of a shared social world, although they do not date the portrait to that Sunday or locate it in a particular room. The fuller story of their households and commissions belongs to Blake’s late years with John Linnell. ^[14]

Professional judgement also passed between them. In November Blake invited Linnell to consider the plates they were bringing towards completion and suggest improvements. His letter treats the younger artist’s scrutiny as useful to the work. This exchange gives a concrete meaning to their artistic friendship: one could look closely, comment and help the other make decisions. A patron’s financial support existed alongside the attention of a fellow practitioner. ^[15]

Portraits in both directions

Linnell also drew Blake at Hampstead. The Fitzwilliam Museum holds a graphite sheet, PD.58-1950, dated about 1825 and inscribed with Blake’s name and the place. It measures 17.9 by 11.5 centimetres. Its approximate date differs in precision from the year recorded on Blake’s portrait of Linnell. The two works establish reciprocal portrait practice within the friendship, without proving that they were made together or conceived as a pair. ^[16]

In its 2024 exhibition guide, William Blake’s Universe, the Fitzwilliam describes its drawing as an informal record associated with the artists’ walks and reads Blake’s turn towards the viewer as conversational. That museum interpretation offers an appealing counterpart to Linnell’s presence in Blake’s sheet. It suggests the value of portraits made within ordinary companionship, while the surviving inscriptions remain the firmer evidence for their shared Hampstead setting. ^[16]

Returning to Blake’s drawing, the most absorbing encounter happens at close range. The broad coat establishes a figure, the lightly traced hair gives the head its shape, and a few more definite marks allow a face to hold our attention. Then Linnell’s writing brings the maker and sitter together by name. Their friendship survives here through two kinds of line: those with which one artist looked at another, and those with which the sitter recorded being seen.