Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion

An old man stands where the cliff meets the sea, his arms folded tightly across his chest. His beard spreads over the fabric beneath his chin; one bare foot reaches towards the bottom edge of the picture. The shoulder and thigh have an imposing weight, yet the bent head and gathered arms turn that strength inward. Behind him, a narrow opening reveals water, cloud and a shaft of light. William Blake has made a solitary figure occupy almost the entire height of a small engraved image. ^[1]

Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion carries two widely separated moments in Blake’s life. He first worked on its copperplate in 1773, during his teenage apprenticeship to James Basire. Decades later he returned to it, altering the engraved surface and supplying words that transformed an inherited Italian figure into an early Christian artist in Britain. The familiar image with its title cut across the upper-right rock belongs to this developed state. Understanding that second encounter gives the print much of its interest: the mature artist found new possibilities in something his younger hand had made. ^[1][2]

A plate with two lives

The Fitzwilliam Museum preserves an impression of the first state, P.391-1985, catalogued as 1773. Beneath the image is a handwritten inscription recalling Blake’s beginnings at Basire’s and identifying a source associated with Salviati after Michelangelo. Mark Crosby points out that this early state is itself undated. The familiar engraved date of 1773 appears on the reworked plate, as a retrospective statement about the work’s origins. The distinction is small on paper and considerable in its consequences: words belonging to Blake’s maturity have often accompanied reproductions presented as evidence of his youth. ^[2][14]

In printmaking, a state records a change made to the printing surface. An impression is an individual sheet printed from it. Several impressions can therefore belong to one state, while their paper, inking, later additions and histories differ. Here, the distinction allows us to follow the continuity of a single copperplate without assigning every surviving sheet to 1773. It also leaves the adolescent exercise and the mature revision available for separate examination. ^[1][2]

The Fitzwilliam’s P.392-1985 is an early impression of the second state, currently dated about 1810. Its plate measures 255 by 139 millimetres; its sheet is 256 by 160 millimetres. The British Museum’s 1864,0611.3 is another second-state impression, described as engraving and etching with grey wash. Its catalogue dates the substantial reworking about 1810–20 and records its purchase from Frederick Tatham in 1864. These are records of particular physical objects. A reproduction of the same composition does not acquire their measurements or ownership history merely because the figure looks familiar. ^[1][3]

The chronology retains some latitude. The Fitzwilliam’s 2024 exhibition guide used the broader range 1810–25 for the revision. These cataloguing differences place the intervention in Blake’s mature career; they do not turn the date engraved beneath the picture into the printing date of every second-state impression. The work can be introduced as begun in 1773 and reworked decades later without pretending that every stage is precisely documented. ^[15]

From Michelangelo to Albion

The figure originated in Michelangelo’s Crucifixion of St Peter in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel. He was an unidentified participant in that much larger composition. The Fitzwilliam identifies Blake’s immediate printed model as an engraving attributed to Nicolas Beatrizet. Its exhibition guide grouped that proposed intermediary with Blake’s early and revised versions. The display places the work within a culture of transmission through portable images that could be studied, copied and changed. ^[14][15]

Blake’s handwritten recollection names a drawing by Salviati after Michelangelo; Crosby describes the figure through Salviati’s copy. These formulations belong to the history of the print’s identification, alongside the museum’s attribution of the intermediary engraving. It should not be converted into a claim that Blake saw Michelangelo’s fresco in person. The act of extraction remains visible: a figure who once stood among others becomes the whole human subject of a new picture. His mass, folded arms and elaborate drapery survive the move; the surrounding narrative changes. ^[1][2][14]

According to the Fitzwilliam’s exhibition commentary, Blake supplied the rocky setting and sea. The space does more than provide somewhere for the borrowed body to stand. The cliff rises close behind the shoulder and presses against the narrow field, while the water opens a distant horizontal prospect on the other side. The figure belongs to both spaces without comfortably settling into either. His foot projects into the foreground, but his face seems withdrawn from the coast around him. ^[1][15]

The later title performs another transformation. Its letters slope across the rock, occupying a surface that might otherwise remain part of the landscape. They give the man a name and make the coast Albion. The naming is essential: a hood, beard and bare feet alone would not securely identify Joseph of Arimathea. Words turn a powerful inherited body into a particular traveller, carrying a Christian past towards a British shore. ^[1][16]

Learning to make stone, flesh and water

The early impression already contains the main arrangement: folded arms, exposed legs, cliff and narrow sea. Its surface is crowded with small marks. Diagonal strokes cover the rock, curved lines turn the limbs, and the water is built from a restless mesh of light and dark. Looking at the first state prevents the teenage work from disappearing beneath the greater definition of the later image. Blake had already undertaken the difficult task of differentiating several substances within a very restricted space. ^[2][14]

Crosby’s technical account gives this achievement an appropriate scale. He finds that the young engraver could construct dense hatching and cross-hatching, while judging the coordination of the different systems less consistent than in the second state. He also reports Ad Stijnman’s suggestion that some dark passages may combine preliminary etching with reinforcement by the burin. This remains a technical proposal about how particular effects were made, rather than a licence to describe every line as cut directly into copper. ^[2]

In the later British Museum impression, the passage from shoulder to upper arm is particularly forceful. Closely spaced marks carry the flesh into shadow, while longer, sharper divisions articulate the cloth beside it. The beard contains streaming curves distinct from the broken facets of the rocks. The dark sea is interrupted by thin horizontal lights. A viewer can follow the image as a succession of material differences: hair, garment, skin and shore remain legible through the varied direction and density of the marks. ^[1]

Those distinctions also govern the mood. The opening beside the cliff promises distance, yet it occupies only a narrow strip. Most of the image’s attention returns to the enclosed body: bent elbows, heavy shoulders, lowered brow. Joseph’s muscular strength does not lead to a dramatic outward action. The print concentrates on the effort of standing and enduring. This makes the later inscription’s account of an unrecognised Christian artist feel closely joined to the figure, even though no cathedral, workshop or building tool appears. ^[1][16]

The artist beneath the picture

The engraved wording below the image begins by remembering the apprentice and his Italian source. It then changes register, declaring the figure one of the Gothic artists responsible for the cathedrals of the supposed Dark Ages. Blake brings an early Christian disciple and medieval makers into one imaginative ancestry. The phrase “what we call the Dark Ages” challenges the judgement carried by the historical label: an age dismissed as dark could have produced works he regarded as spiritually distinguished. ^[16]

This is an artistic and religious claim, expressed through deliberate compression of time. It supplies no evidence that the first-century Joseph literally designed medieval cathedrals. Instead, the inscription makes him exemplary of a kind of maker whose value exceeds the recognition offered by the surrounding world. The single figure becomes the representative of a community extending across centuries. Read in that way, his solitude is compatible with the claim that he belongs to a large and enduring company. ^[16]

The picture keeps the argument bodily. Joseph has neither an architect’s plan nor a commemorative monument to explain his achievement. His folded arms can suggest cold, weariness or meditation; the image leaves those possibilities open. The inscription supplies the honour withheld by his outward circumstances. A man standing on a rough shore can belong among the makers of the most ambitious sacred buildings. ^[1][16]

There is a further connection in the making of the sheet itself. Blake’s engraving transforms a Renaissance model by working again over a plate from his apprenticeship. His account of Christian artistic continuity is thus attached to a physical act of returning to earlier art. The older image remains present inside the new one. The revision makes inheritance an active process, in which renewed labour and newly added language can redirect what a figure means. ^[1][2][16]

The people of whom the world was unworthy

The inscription’s reference to people wandering in animal skins draws on Hebrews 11:37–38. The chapter begins by defining faith and then gathers examples from Abel, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Moses and others. Its later verses move from victories to torture, imprisonment, deprivation and wandering. Those denied ordinary security nevertheless possess a spiritual distinction that the world around them cannot adequately recognise. Blake selects from this account to describe his Christian artists. ^[16][17]

The biblical context sharpens the transformation. Hebrews is looking back across the faithful before the Christian fulfilment it anticipates; its Joseph is the patriarch associated with the Exodus, not Joseph of Arimathea. Blake’s concluding extension to Christians of every age draws that earlier company into his own account of artistic faith. The inscription uses scripture to imagine continuity across history, passing over the chronological boundaries that a literal biography would have to observe. ^[17]

Hebrews also supplies a landscape of deserts, mountains, dens and caves. Its catalogue of displacement makes the print’s rocky margin a resonant setting for someone whom ordinary society cannot accommodate. This connection does not require identifying a particular cave or geographical landing place. The exposed body, scant clothing and uneven ground bring material hardship close, while the sustained upright figure gives that hardship an answering persistence. ^[1][17]

Read beside the whole chapter, the inscription’s praise is more demanding than a picturesque enthusiasm for the medieval past. Its admired community includes people who have not received the promise during their lifetimes. Recognition and reward cannot be measured by immediate worldly success. That is a powerful framework to attach to an artist: the quality of the work and the faith sustaining it may survive neglect, even when their maker remains at the edge of the visible world. This is the implication of Blake’s joining of text and image, rather than a documented statement about Joseph’s private thoughts. ^[16][17]

A disciple, a British legend and another print

Joseph’s role in the Gospel of John is more specific. After the Crucifixion, he obtains Pilate’s permission to take Christ’s body. Nicodemus brings spices, and together they prepare the body for burial in a nearby new tomb. John describes Joseph as a secret disciple. It gives him an act of care at a moment of danger and grief, but does not send him to Britain or make him a cathedral builder. ^[18]

The British associations belong to later traditions. Getty’s iconographic record distinguishes Joseph’s Gospel burial role from legends connecting him with Glastonbury and the Holy Grail. Those traditions help explain the imaginative possibilities of Blake’s title. They do not establish the journey as a Gospel event, and nothing in the engraving identifies a Grail vessel. Its Christian history is carried by the named body, setting and inscription. ^[19]

A separate Blake composition makes an instructive companion. The National Gallery of Art’s Joseph of Arimathea Preaching to the Britons, accession 1943.3.8988, is dated about 1794/1796. It is a colour-printed relief etching finished with pen and watercolour, belonging to A Large Book of Designs. It must be distinguished from the tall, reworked intaglio plate: medium, arrangement and object history are different. ^[20]

In that image, a white-bearded teacher stands at the right, extending an arm towards a gathered audience. The listeners fill the width of the scene beneath a richly coloured sky. Public address gives the preacher’s body its direction. The solitary figure among the rocks holds his arms against himself and has no visible congregation. Together, the compositions show how differently Blake could imagine a Christian presence in Britain: through a teaching gesture exchanged with others, or through an inward figure whose artistic and spiritual company emerges in the words below him. ^[1][20]

The revised engraving rewards looking down as well as into the picture. At the top, a title names an isolated man; beneath his feet, a few lines claim him for an immense history of faithful makers. Between those texts stands a body inherited from Michelangelo and remade through Blake’s own labour. The small sheet holds those different times together, allowing an apprentice’s exercise to become a mature statement about who deserves to be remembered as an artist. ^[1][16]