Lear and Cordelia in Prison

Cordelia bends over her sleeping father, gathering her hands near her face while his head rests on her lap. Lear’s body stretches across the floor, his knees drawn up and his bare feet reaching towards the right edge. William Blake gives the pair a room almost emptied of everything except stone and shadow. In this small watercolour, care has become a physical arrangement: one person stays upright so that another can lie down. Tate dates Lear and Cordelia in Prison to about 1779, placing its quiet drama near the beginning of Blake’s independent career. ^[1]

The familiar names invite us to remember Shakespeare, but the source is more complicated. Shakespeare does not put this sleeping pair together in a prison scene. A later adaptation by Nahum Tate does, while the picture’s probable relationship to Blake’s early English history watercolours has led scholars towards Milton’s History of Britain. These possibilities illuminate different aspects of the image. The stage supplies an exceptionally close match for its central pose; the historical series helps explain why Blake might have chosen Lear at all. ^[1]

Care inside the prison

The first thing to follow is the meeting of the two figures. Lear’s pale head lies against Cordelia’s clothed knees, with one arm reaching forward and a hand hanging down over her garment. His other arm folds beneath or beside his face. The slackness of the hands and the low position of his head give sleep a weight. His body occupies much of the sheet’s width, but depends upon the seated figure at its left. Without Cordelia, the arrangement would lose both its physical support and its emotional centre. ^[1]

Cordelia’s gesture is more tightly gathered. Her elbows bend, her hands rise towards her face, and her head inclines towards the sleeper. Her blue sleeve creates a dark, rounded shape beside her cheek, setting the compressed upper body against the spread of cloth below. We can read grief or anxious concentration in this posture, but Blake leaves the precise movement suspended. She neither addresses an audience nor performs an unmistakable act of rescue. Her posture concentrates attention on the difficulty of waiting beside someone who cannot respond. ^[1]

The clothing joins the bodies across the floor. Blues in Cordelia’s upper garment return in Lear’s outer drapery, while subdued rose and brown distinguish his bent legs and sleeve. Loose folds spread towards the lower left; a larger blue passage carries the eye beneath Lear towards his feet. The repeated colour allows us to see the pair as a connected group before tracing the separate outlines of their limbs. Pen lines keep the changing edges legible through the washes. ^[1]

Above them, thin horizontal and vertical strokes suggest courses of masonry. The wall is much less densely described than the clothing, making the figures seem to gather nearly all the room’s activity into themselves. A tall dark rectangle occupies the upper right. Its depth remains uncertain: it reads as an opening or shadowed recess, leaving an area into which the eye can enter without finding another person. Blake needs very little architecture to make the shared shelter feel enclosed. ^[1]

The contrast is especially striking because the room occupies so much space. Both figures remain in the lower part of the composition, below a broad expanse of wall. Their intimacy has no domestic furniture around it, no bed, table or welcoming interior. The support Cordelia offers takes the place of what the room withholds. The familiar story of a king and his daughter becomes intelligible through an ordinary bodily necessity, finding somewhere for an exhausted head to rest. ^[1]

A small sheet and an early date

Tate’s current record identifies the work as ink and watercolour on paper, with a support measuring 131 × 182 millimetres. It is a picture that could be held comfortably in the hands. Martin Butlin’s 1990 catalogue entry, reproduced by Tate, records the painted area as 123 × 175 millimetres on paper measuring 132 × 182 millimetres. The older distinction between image and sheet is useful; the slightly different recorded sheet height should not be mistaken for a change in the size of the composition. ^[1]

At this scale, the line has considerable work to do. A few marks establish an eyelid, a wrist or the turn of a bare foot. Darker strokes reinforce the bunching of fabric beneath the seated figure, while the wall is left comparatively open. The result is intimate without becoming casually sketched. The distribution of detail makes the bodies readable and directs attention towards the place where they meet. It also rewards a slower look than the picture’s modest dimensions might initially suggest. ^[1]

The approximate date matters as well. Blake entered the Royal Academy Schools in October 1779. Tate’s catalogue groups this sheet provisionally with small historical watercolours of similar style and dimensions. Its carefully organised figures belong to the developing ambitions of a young history painter, before the illuminated books that now dominate many introductions to his work. The broader training behind these early designs is explored in Blake’s early life and apprenticeship. ^[1]

Which Lear does Blake show?

Shakespeare’s final act creates a powerful expectation of prison, but leaves this particular encounter unstaged. At the beginning of Act V, scene 3, the defeated Lear imagines a life of shared seclusion with Cordelia, withdrawn from the changes of political fortune. The pair are led away. Much later, the attempted reprieve arrives too late: Lear returns carrying the dead Cordelia. Blake’s reclining father and seated daughter occupy a different moment and reverse that final relationship of bearer and burden. Its shared confinement belongs to the wider story, while the sleeping arrangement requires a different explanation. ^[12]

Nahum Tate’s The History of King Lear, published in 1681, offers the much closer visual correspondence. The prison sequence in Act V opens with the direction, “Lear asleep, with his Head on Cordelia’s Lap.” Cordelia then wonders at his deep sleep after suffering, before officers enter to kill them. Lear wakes imagining battle, resists the attackers, and survives with Cordelia when help arrives. This sequence, identified as Act V, scene 3 in Butlin’s discussion, gives the pose its own dramatic setting, including both the respite and the danger surrounding it. ^[13]

The correspondence is precise, but it does not prove which book Blake had open. In the watercolour the threatening officers have not appeared. The room holds only the father and daughter, and its stillness allows the pause to become the entire subject. Knowing Tate’s sequence makes that stillness precarious: their refuge can be interrupted. Yet the composition supplies no visible resolution. It asks us to remain with care under confinement before deciding how the larger story will end. ^[1][13]

Butlin’s catalogue attributes a different preference to David Bindman. Because the sheet probably belongs to Blake’s English history series, Bindman considered Milton’s History of Britain, published in 1670, a more likely source. The argument concerns the setting of the subject within Blake’s historical interests, rather than the presence in Milton of an identical stage direction. It remains a scholarly proposal, reported through the catalogue, and sits alongside the unusually close theatrical parallel. ^[1]

Milton’s account makes that distinction essential. In Book I, Cordeilla cares for Leir after his older daughters have reduced him to distress. She arranges for him to be washed, clothed and restored to a fitting public appearance; an army subsequently returns him to his throne. After his death she rules, until her nephews overthrow and imprison her. Milton does not describe father and daughter sharing this prison tableau. His narrative supports an interest in filial care and legendary British kingship, while Tate’s adaptation supplies the exact sleeping arrangement. ^[14]

Reading the sources together preserves what is most interesting about Blake’s choice. A literary subject can belong to several connected traditions, each carrying a different account of suffering, restoration and responsibility. Here the picture fixes upon dependence. The bowed daughter and sleeping father remain understandable even to someone who cannot identify the passage, while the competing texts change the future we imagine beyond the room. ^{[1][12][13][14]}

A place in English history

Blake himself included King Lear in a Notebook list of subjects for The History of England. The entry comes fourth, after the ancient giants, the landing of Brutus and Corineus throwing Gogmagog into the sea. Later subjects include Julius Caesar, Boadicea, Alfred and Jane Shore. The list places Lear within a long national story that joins legend with more recent history. It gives the historical interpretation firmer ground than the subject’s royal identity alone, although it does not establish that every listed design was engraved or published. ^[15]

That sequence helps explain Bindman’s interest in Milton. The early part of Milton’s history follows the legendary Trojan origins of Britain before reaching Leir and his daughters. Butlin also connects Blake’s prison sheet with a small watercolour of Brutus’s landing. The proposed series could therefore give an individual act of loyalty a place within the beginnings and fortunes of a nation. A stone room and two vulnerable people are enough to carry one episode in that larger scheme. ^[1][14]

Evidence for dating the early group comes partly from another work. In his Descriptive Catalogue of 1809, Blake said that the drawing of The Penance of Jane Shore in St Paul’s Church on display had been “done above Thirty Years ago”. Butlin relates the statement to what seems to have been the earlier version of that subject. It supports a late 1770s setting for the early historical watercolours without supplying an exact date for Lear and Cordelia. The connection between the sheets depends on their style, dimensions and subject matter as well as this retrospective statement. ^[1][8]

Blake’s comment also shows him looking back with confidence. He used the old drawing to defend continuity between his youthful and mature abilities. That is the artist’s claim about his own achievement, made in an exhibition catalogue with a strongly argumentative purpose. Even so, it prevents the early pictures from becoming mere exercises to be hurried past on the way to his later visions. Blake wanted at least one of them to remain part of his public account of what he could do. ^[8]

An unfinished publishing history

The historical ambitions resurfaced in Blake’s prospectus of 10 October 1793. Among the works advertised from Hercules Buildings in Lambeth was The History of England, described as a small book of engravings and priced at three shillings. The same prospectus offered the much larger historical engraving Edward and Elinor, alongside illuminated books. Different formats could carry Blake’s inventions to a buying public: a small sequence to be turned through, or a separate print large enough to stand alone. ^[16]

No copy of the advertised history book is known, according to Butlin. His catalogue suggests that Blake revisited some early historical subjects in larger watercolours around this period, perhaps with separate engravings in mind. The surviving sheets, the Notebook list and the advertisement consequently record related ambitions at different moments. They do not establish a completed published series, or prove that this little prison picture was made specifically for the 1793 announcement. Its early date and the later commercial proposal remain distinct parts of the story. ^[1][15][16]

That distinction makes the small watercolour more revealing. It preserves a complete composition from an undertaking whose eventual shape cannot be reconstructed as a finished book. The scene already works at its own scale, concentrating the emotional exchange within a sharply bounded rectangle. The prospectus reveals how such historical invention might enter a programme of publication, without explaining every decision behind the earlier sheet. ^[1][16]

The picture after Blake

The sheet’s later history begins close to Blake’s household. Butlin records its sale by Catherine Blake around 1828–29 to Mrs Samuel Smith and Miss Julia Smith. An inscription on the mount recalls a purchase from Blake’s widow in the first or second year after his death, and identifies the subject with his early manner. Such writing preserves how owners understood and remembered the drawing; it is a later record around the object, rather than an inscription dating its execution. ^[1]

The catalogue traces it through the Smith family’s descendants to a Sotheby’s sale in March 1934, when Alice Carthew bought it. Her bequest brought it to Tate in 1940. The picture had appeared at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1876 and was included in the Arts Council’s Shakespeare in Art exhibition in 1964. That exhibition history helps explain the strength of the Shakespearean association even as the fuller catalogue complicates its source. ^[1]

A Tate label from 2004 similarly called it a scene from Shakespeare and connected its style with later testimony about Joshua Reynolds advising the young Blake towards greater simplicity. The reported criticism is part of the reception of Blake’s early designs; it does not establish that Reynolds saw this particular sheet. For this picture, the more useful judgement begins with its visible economy: two figures, a bare wall, a dark opening, and a body held above the floor by another person’s care. ^[1]

Butlin also records this subject among seven small oval watercolours at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. That is a separate version, whose format and membership of a different group distinguish it from Tate’s rectangular sheet. The familiar title consequently names a subject Blake treated more than once, as well as this particular drawing. ^[1]

Tate’s rectangular design makes its strongest claim through bodily dependence. Lear has lost the upright bearing we might expect of a ruler; Cordelia’s seated body supplies the support his condition requires. The small scale brings the exchange close, while the empty wall leaves it exposed. Whatever balance we give the historical and theatrical sources, Blake has made a scene in which dependence can be seen at once, through the resting head, the hanging hand and the daughter who stays beside them. ^[1]