Thenot and Colinet

Two shepherds occupy opposite sides of a small, densely worked landscape. At the left, an elderly bearded man raises one hand and extends the other towards his companion. At the right, a younger man rests against a tree, one arm lifted behind his head. Sheep crowd the foreground between them. Beyond their bodies, low hills and a tiny building lead towards an opening in the sky. William Blake gives this conversation the weight of an encounter taking place in an entire world. ^[1]

Thenot and Colinet is the larger frontispiece among Blake’s wood engravings for Robert John Thornton’s The Pastorals of Virgil, with a Course of English Reading, Adapted for Schools, published in its third edition in 1821. Its immediate subject comes from an English poem by Ambrose Philips, an imitation of Virgil’s first eclogue. The two figures introduce different ages and different experiences of happiness. Their exchange brings disappointment, judgement and the possibility of care into the pastoral landscape. ^[1][2]

The space between the shepherds

Thenot’s beard makes the older speaker recognisable. His long garment reaches the ground, where its folds spread beside his feet. Colinet’s shorter clothing leaves his lower legs exposed. The contrast gives the figures distinct silhouettes before we read their faces: one enclosed in a continuous descending shape, the other held by a curved trunk and the lifted angle of an arm. Both remain close to the picture’s front edge. ^[1]

Their gestures carry much of the conversation. Thenot’s raised hand seems to mark a point, while his lower, outstretched hand opens towards the flock and the space his companion occupies. Colinet leans bodily into the tree. His stance can look relaxed at first, but the head supported by an uplifted arm also suits a figure absorbed in trouble. The engraving establishes a difference between addressing another person and remaining caught in one’s own thoughts, without turning either man into a simple emblem. ^[1][2]

A tall crook rises beside the younger shepherd. Its narrow upright cuts across the horizontal bands of the sky, separating his body from the central distance. Another slender object hangs against the tree behind him. Such details place these figures within the equipment and habits of pastoral life, although the strongest connection with their work lies below: the flock presses directly into the interval between them. The animals keep the conversation grounded in a shared occupation. ^[1]

The sheep also complicate the arrangement of two isolated figures. Several lower their heads; a darker face looks out from near the centre. Their overlapping bodies form a compact group that nearly bridges the width between Thenot’s robe and Colinet’s feet. The shepherds stand apart, but something living and dependent occupies their common ground. Blake gives that connection a visual presence before the poem explains how Thenot will help. ^[1][2]

Behind them, the landscape becomes progressively smaller in scale. A roof and doorway are visible in the middle distance, tucked into the ground below the hills. This little building offers a measure of depth against the large foreground bodies. It also keeps the possibility of human shelter within the scene. The tree makes an immediate place to lean; the distant dwelling suggests a more complete enclosure. Neither has to be identified with a particular house in the poem for their relation to matter. ^[1]

Two voices in the same spring

Philips’s poem is his second pastoral, although Thornton presents it as an imitation of Virgil’s first eclogue. Those numbers refer to different sequences. The poem survives in versions whose wording varies: the 1710 text and the later text reprinted by Thomas B. Mosher in 1899 both set Thenot’s cheerful old age against Colinet’s unhappy youth. Mosher explicitly states that he restores Philips’s 1748 wording in place of Thornton’s alterations. These texts make the dialogue intelligible while preserving a distinction between Philips’s poem and the exact wording of the schoolbook. ^[2]

Thenot begins by questioning unhappiness that seems at odds with the season. The birds sing and the surroundings promise pleasure, yet Colinet remains miserable. Colinet replies that the creatures’ music tells us nothing about his own condition. The same spring can support radically different experiences. That disagreement is useful when looking at Blake’s frontispiece: an open sky, grazing sheep and leafy branches cannot by themselves prove that everyone within the landscape feels at ease. ^[2]

Age does not settle the matter either. Thenot recognises his declining strength but retains a cheerful mind. He initially regards youthful complaint with impatience, as though Colinet has failed to appreciate the advantages of being young. His willingness to hear the story develops beyond that first judgement. The older shepherd’s authority includes experience, but the conversation still requires him to discover circumstances he does not yet know. ^[2]

Colinet worries that a long account of his grief will distract Thenot from his flock. Thenot arranges for Lightfoot to attend to the animals and promises to keep an eye on them himself. Listening therefore depends on a practical adjustment to work. The closely gathered sheep in the frontispiece make this exchange especially telling: the concerns of the conversation and the needs of the flock belong within the same field of attention. We need not identify a small mark in the distance as Lightfoot to recognise that relationship. ^[2]

The younger man’s story concerns wandering, poverty and the desire to be valued. He has left the banks of Sabrina and travelled towards Cam, hoping for more than his own home could offer. His ambitions include fame, and the mockery of his songs wounds him more deeply than cold or want. A pastoral singer’s complaint allows the poem to consider what happens when an audience meets creative work with contempt. Colinet needs a listener whose judgement differs from the hostility he has encountered. ^[2]

The promise of Menalcas’s support gives his singing another audience, while Thenot supplies an immediate response. At the close, the older shepherd offers to fold their flocks together and share food and a resting place. For the frontispiece, this ending makes the distance between the men consequential. A companion who initially questions grief can become someone who makes room for it. The gestures and intervening flock let the image introduce that possibility without depicting every event the poem contains. ^[2]

Virgil’s first eclogue supplies a related but distinct situation. In Samuel Palmer’s later translation, Tityrus rests beneath a tree while Meliboeus faces departure from his native land. Their conversation concerns freedom, protection and dispossession, and ends with an invitation to stay the night. Philips develops the contrast through his own English places and the difficulties of a young singer. Blake’s figures should accordingly be read as Thenot and Colinet: calling them simply Tityrus and Meliboeus would lose the poem he was illustrating. ^[2][15]

Light made from pale cuts

The tree does more than support Colinet’s body. Its trunk holds the right edge, and its branches spread across the upper part of the engraving. Below that canopy the sky opens into broad, pale forms. A curved segment appears at the horizon, while light seems to fan upwards between darker shapes. The opening draws the eye past the foreground encounter and gives the little rectangle a reach far beyond its shallow surface. ^[1]

The sky remains visibly made from lines. Closely spaced horizontal strokes pass through both its lighter and darker regions, interrupted or varied where the shapes change. The radiating structure never dissolves into a smooth glow. Looking closely means moving between two perceptions: an atmospheric opening over the hills and an organised field of marks. Blake allows the work of the engraved surface to remain part of the experience of light. ^[1]

The same activity changes direction as it crosses the figures. Slanting strokes describe the folds of Thenot’s robe and the fabric around Colinet’s torso. Shorter, broken marks articulate fleece, earth and foliage. The sheep’s pale backs carry light into the lower centre, while their dark faces and the gaps between them prevent the flock from becoming an undifferentiated white band. The whole scene depends on differences within black and white, from the long bands of sky to the small interruptions along the ground. ^[1]

Wood engraving makes these pale passages materially significant. Cutting removes parts of a surface that otherwise receives ink; the remaining surface prints dark. Louise Wilson’s technical study explains the demanding relationship between Blake’s fine cuts, the paper and the application of ink. Here that basic process becomes readily visible: light has the sharpness and directional force of an incision. The engraving guide places this method beside Blake’s work on metal. ^[3]

The image does not require an exact time of day to make its effect. Philips’s poem moves from its initial spring setting towards evening hospitality, but the frontispiece gathers its people and landscape into a single introduction. The low bright form and spreading pale areas can suggest a charged moment of transition. Naming a precise sunrise or sunset would give the sky a certainty the composition itself does not demand. Its stronger achievement is to make illumination feel held within an encompassing darkness. ^[1][2]

A larger image before the sequence

The frontispiece has a different task from the smaller narrative scenes. Tate’s catalogue distinguishes it as the larger design and records no known preparatory drawing for it. A surviving drawing of the two shepherds conversing, catalogued separately within the preparatory group, was not engraved; it should not be treated as the frontispiece’s established preliminary study merely because its subject sounds similar. The printed composition has to be considered on its own terms. ^[1]

Most of Blake’s other designs were cut in groups of four on a block, then separated and reduced for the published arrangement. The frontispiece stands apart from that grouped format. Its greater height gives the shepherds room to extend from the ground to the canopy, while the flock and distance occupy a substantial central interval. It can introduce a relationship in a broad, stable encounter before the following images develop particular moments of recollection, journeying and hospitality. ^[1]

The book setting also clarifies what is meant by Blake’s contribution. Tate identifies seventeen wood engravings after his own designs that he cut himself, including this frontispiece. Thornton’s publication contained 232 illustrations altogether, with other makers and other processes involved. Blake also engraved copperplate subjects for it. The scale of the larger publication matters, but the frontispiece’s intimacy comes from concentrating attention on these two speakers within that busy educational setting. ^[1]

For a schoolboy reader, an English dialogue could make the ancient pastoral form approachable. Two different people speak, challenge one another and gradually disclose what lies behind a complaint. The image offers a similarly direct entrance through age, posture, a tree and a flock. Its visual density rewards a slower encounter than that first recognition. The complete Pastorals of Virgil series follows the changing settings and circumstances that the frontispiece introduces. ^[1][2]

The design and its printed lives

A date attached to this composition needs a second question: when was the particular impression printed? Tate’s A00111 is catalogued as a design of about 1821, printed in 1830. Its catalogue proposes Edward Calvert as the probable printer of the set. The image measures 62 by 84 millimetres, on a sheet measuring 65 by 87 millimetres; the group is described as printed on thin commercial wove paper. These details belong to Tate’s named object and set. ^[1]

Tate’s T02115 represents another encounter with the same wooden design. Iain Bain and David Chambers printed it in 1977 from the original block, as part of a project for the British Museum. Tate records an image measuring 61 by 83 millimetres and Japanese Hosho paper for the set. Its catalogue reports 150 sets of the seventeen engravings and fifty additional frontispiece impressions. Tate reports that this printing recovered details and tonal gradations missed in earlier pulls, despite damage and warping in the wood. The later date describes a real act of printing, more than a century after Blake’s death. ^[4]

Tate’s reproductions also show why margins matter. A00111’s narrow surround leaves the double border close to the sheet’s edge; T02115 appears within a wider expanse of pale paper. The border holds the scene together, while the surrounding paper changes its relation to the object we see. An enlargement cropped closely around the shepherds can conceal this difference and weaken our sense of the image’s small physical scale. ^[1][4]

The original blocks had survived through the Linnell family. Electrotypes made for Geoffrey Keynes’s 1937 publication supplied metal duplicates from which impressions could be printed. The blocks themselves were sold from the Linnell estate in December 1938 and acquired by the British Museum in 1939. An impression from an electrotype and a 1977 impression from the wood thus reach the composition through different immediate printing surfaces. Their similar subject does not erase that physical difference. ^[1][4]

Printed appearance also varies within the life of an original block. Wilson’s examination of the wider series shows how uneven inking can obscure fine detail or leave passages faint. Paper and printing conditions help determine how clearly an engraved design reaches the eye. Her findings do not identify the printer of an unmarked reproduction of this frontispiece. They explain why the concentration of light should be examined in a named impression before variations in tone are attributed entirely to Blake’s conception. ^[3]

The illustration reproduced here shows this composition, but its exact physical impression has not been securely identified. It therefore cannot automatically inherit the printing date, paper or measurements of either Tate example. The two records instead provide useful comparisons: one preserves a probable early posthumous printing, the other a documented twentieth-century return to the original wood. The design’s continuity becomes more interesting when those different objects retain their own histories. ^[1][4]

Samuel Palmer’s response gives a final reason to look patiently at this light. In the testimony quoted by Tate, he praises the series’ secluded landscapes and struggles to describe their combination of depth and brilliance. His phrase “a mystic and dreamy glimmer” concerns an imaginative experience that ordinary daylight cannot quite explain. That is Palmer’s account, transmitted through the museum’s catalogue, rather than a description Blake left of his intention. ^[1]

In the frontispiece, the glimmer has a concrete structure: a canopy above, sheep below, and an opening between two people. Thenot’s hands reach into that space while Colinet’s body remains supported at its edge. The poem gives their encounter duration; the engraving gives it a place we can continue to examine. Its small world holds both the difficulty of being understood and the attention through which a companion might begin to understand.