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A
"Mad" but Compelling Vision
At
the heart of the British Art Center's collections is a trove of
delicate works on paper by the English poet and artist William Blake.
A show opening this month illustrates the breadth and depth of his
durably disturbing appeal.
April
1997
by Patrick Noon
Patrick
Noon was Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Rare Books at the British
Art Center. This article is adapted from his essay for the catalog
of the exhibition, "The
Human Form Divine: William Blake from the Paul Mellon Collection,"
and was published by Yale University Press in 1997.
The collections
of the Yale Center for British Art constitute a repository of such
richness and depth
that their rapid accumulation, primarily during the third quarter
of this century, is a feat which astounds visitors and specialists
alike. Two names dominate this exceptional story: Paul Mellon '29,
whose benefactions in the arts are fabled, and William Blake (1757-1827),
the visionary poet and artist whose own world of archetypal giants
largely inspired the program of acquisition that culminated in the
founding of the BAC. However, the centrality of Blake to the Mellon
collection is rarely apparent. Because of the extreme fragility
of Blake's works, only one of them is ever on permanent view in
the Center's galleries. The casual visitor to the museum is treated
to the serenity of George Stubbs's sporting art, to a banquet of
landscape painters of which J. M. W. Turner and John Constable fix
the parameters of romantic excellence, to an unexpected ensemble
of Ben Nicholson's abstract constructions. But only scholars tend
to venture beyond the Center's public spaces into the Study Room
for prints, drawings, and rare books, where the whole of Blake's
universe awaits a more intimate reading. A unique opportunity to
see that universe unfolded is being provided this month when the
Yale Center for British Art celebrates its 20th anniversary-and
Paul Mellon's 90th birthday-with a major exhibition, "The Human
Form Divine: William Blake from the Paul Mellon Collection."
When Paul Mellon began
to acquire British art in the 1960s, he ventured into an area of
collecting that was much undervalued internationally and very much
the private preserve of a handful of passionate but aging British
gentlemen. Possibly as many as one-third of the Center's 50,000
watercolors, drawings, and prints and 20,000 rare books originated
in a discrete number of private collections. But the one group of
graphic works that weaves the many strands of Paul Mellon's personal
interests and experiences-his formative years at Yale, when he was
privileged to study with such legendary mentors as Chauncey Brewster
Tinker; his passion for illustrated books and for British art, which
dates from the 1930s; and his admiration for esoteric traditions
in Western intellectual thought-is not the legacy of some other
collector. Rather, it is the remarkable collection of William Blake's
books, paintings, and engravings, which Mr. Mellon assembled piecemeal
and entirely according to his own tastes. The trove might be viewed
as the core collection of the BAC.
Paul Mellon began to
build a private library while studying at Cambridge University in
the 1930s. His initial purchases were "color-plate" and
sporting books. Of Blake, he has recalled that "his haunting
poetry with its arcane mythology and his beautiful illuminated books
have always held a special appeal to me," and it was perhaps
inevitable that he would begin collecting Blake at an early date.
Blake was one of the most singular of all romantic geniuses, having
equal claim to renown as a poet, a painter, an experimental engraver,
and a philosopher. This genius is nowhere more evident than in his
so-called illuminated books. Coincidentally, Mellon's first Blake
purchase, in 1941, was also Blake's first illuminated book, There
is No Natural Religion (1788). From that moment, hardly a year
passed when the collector did not acquire some Blake opus. The harvest
is impressive, consisting as it does of four tempera paintings and
several hundred prints and watercolors. But it is the 12 illuminated
books that confer on Mellon's collection its eminence.
Blake
first used the term "Illuminated Book" in a 1793 prospectus
advertising his published illustrated poems.
The allusion to medieval manuscript illumination was intentional.
Beginning with There is No Natural Religion and Songs
Of Innocence (1789), Blake invented a unique printmaking technique
that enabled him to print both his text and designs from the same
copper plates. Conventional publishing of the period employed letterpress
and engraved plates, each of which was printed separately. Blake's
technique, now referred to as "relief etching," involved
painting an illustration and writing the text, in reverse, on the
surface of one copper plate with an acid-resistant varnish. Acid
was then poured over the plate to etch away the exposed areas and
leave in relief the designs and verse. Blake would then ink the
raised areas and print the plate on paper using a standard engraver's
rolling press.
Blake's earliest illuminated
books were usually printed in one color of ink and then further
hand-colored with watercolor. In about 1794, and for several years
after that, the artist began printing the plates with a variety
of thick, colored inks that yielded effects of stunning richness.
The print for the famous poem "The Tyger" from Songs
of Experience (1794) or the plates from The First Book of
Urizen (1795) are exemplars of that advanced process. By means
of this novel technique-his "infernal method," as he called
it-Blake created a composite of poetry, painting, and printmaking
without precedence or parallel in Western art.
In the mid-1940s, Paul
Mellon was able to purchase copies of the Book of Thel, several
copies of Songs, and the copy of Europe, A Prophecy that
had belonged at one time to Benjamin Disraeli. These were joined
in the 1950s by Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and America,
A Prophecy from the celebrated library of William A. White,
as well as by one of the few copies of The First Book of Urizen with a full complement of 28 plates. The final illuminated book
to enter the collection, in 1972, was a second copy of Urizen, thus bringing together two of only eight known printings of that
magnificent prophetic work.
Mellon's pursuit of
Blake would introduce him to a distinguished group of senior bibliophiles
who had made it their business to transfer the great Blake collections
from private to public ownership-in particular, Lessing J. Rosenwald
in America, and the renowned Blake scholar, Sir Geoffrey Keynes,
in England. They had begun collecting Blake much earlier, and while
the Mellon collection does not match their comprehensiveness, it
ultimately ranks with them because of two stellar acquisitions:
the 116 watercolor illustrations of the poems of Thomas Gray, and
the most coveted of Blake's illuminated books, the unique, watercolored
copy of Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion.
Jerusalem occupied
Blake from 1804 until the last years of his life. It is an epic
poem that tells an abstruse story of spiritual redemption in which
all opposing forces within humankind are reconciled in the eternal
unity of Christ's sacrifice. Blake printed only five copies of this
masterwork in the 1820s. The Mellon copy was printed in orange-red
ink and, by Blake's standards, lavishly finished with watercolor
and gold paint (a commodity of amazing value to an artist whose
daily sustenance was never guaranteed!). The remaining four copies,
uncolored and printed in black, lack both the enchanting lyricism
of the delicately tinted pages of text in the Mellon copy, and the
majesty that Blake's coloring imparts to certain formal elements
in its illustrations. The labor involved in printing and coloring
the 100 plates was tremendous, yet sadly this copy remained unsold
at Blake's death, in 1827. As with so much of Blake's writing, the
poem was considered unintelligible, if not actually mad, by most
of his contemporaries.
Today
it is recognized as the consummation of his genius
as a poet, artist, and prophetic revolutionary, his longest and
most personal testament of beliefs, his most brilliantly designed
and technically innovative work of art. And until now, it has never
been exhibited publicly in its entirety.
With regard to the commission
and destination of the watercolor illustrations for Thomas Gray's
Poems, no such uncertainty exists. Blake was blessed in having many
generous friends, among whom the sculptor John Flaxman occupied
an esteemed position. Flaxman helped subsidize the publication of
Blake's first poems, Poetical Sketches (1783), and he later
introduced the artist to many other patrons. In 1797, Flaxman paid
Blake to illustrate the popular odes of Thomas Gray for his wife
as a birthday present.
Blake had no reservations
about illustrating another poet's work; rather, he treated Gray's
verse as a starting point for his own imaginative flights. More
often than not, his designs are replete with allusions and inventions
of whimsical genius that remain as wondrous and delightful to us
as they no doubt had been to Ann and John Flaxman. "Elegy Written
in a Country Church-Yard" was Gray's most famous poem, but
Blake was more interested in "The Bard," perhaps fancying
himself a modern incarnation of this mythical Welsh poet. The ode
inevitably inspired the most monumental and heroic of his designs
for Mrs. Flaxman. "The Bard 'Weaving the Winding Sheet of Edward's
Race'" is a riveting example of imaginative interpretation.
The loom of King Edward I's fate is envisioned as a harp of huge
strings weeping droplets of blood, on which the Bard chants his
augury of the king's demise.
The desire to preserve
intact collections or groups of objects has always been a characteristic
of Paul Mellon's collecting designs. It informed his purchase in
1959 of the 800 surviving volumes of John Locke's library and its
subsequent donation to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and his purchases
for the British Art Center, well after it opened in 1977, of George
Stubbs's Comparative Anatomical drawings and J. M. W. Turner's breathtaking
"Channel" sketchbook, both of which were destined by the
art trade to be disbound and sold by the sheet. It is highly probable
that Mellon's acquisition of Jerusalem in 1953 and of the Gray watercolors
in 1966 saved both from similar desecration and dispersal.
Blake's earliest training
had been as a reproductive engraver, and he practiced that trade
throughout his career. Paul Mellon was no less attentive to this
underestimated dimension of Blake's oeuvre than to any other, and
the works he collected reveal how varied Blake's craftsmanship could
be-from the polished professionalism of the illustrations for Edward
Young's Night Thoughts to the archaism of the great Chaucer's
Canterbury Pilgrims. He was equally comfortable with new or experimental
techniques of his own or of another's creation, such as his relief
etchings and the large monotypes he produced between 1795 and 1805.
The popular technique of lithography entered his repertoire in the
1820s. He sortied into wood-engraving only once, but with seductive
originality. All of these fascinate, but the Illustrations of
the Book of Job, executed in 1825, stand apart as a tour-de-force
of the engraver's art, intentionally evocative of Northern renaissance
engraving yet thoroughly modern in their delicately incised brilliance.
In 1979,
Paul Mellon made his last Blake purchase to date:
"The Man Sweeping the Interpreter's Parlour" (c. 1822).
It is, coincidentally, also one of Blake's last engravings. The
subject is a passage from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in
which an old man, reminiscent of Urizen and representing moral law,
stirs up the dust of corruption in the soul of a man as an angel
attempts to calm the clouds, billowing with Goya-esque demons, by
sprinkling the floor with the cleansing grace of the Gospel. We
alight once again on Blake's favorite theme of redemption, borrowed
from another author but recast with simplicity in the visual language
of his own peculiar mythology.
Any visitor to the British
Art Center will gain an overview of the accomplishments of a number
of artists who were profoundly gifted or whose contributions proved
seminal to the development of the art of their epoch. Exceptional
groups of oils, drawings, and prints-by Bonington, Gainsborough,
and Hogarth, to name but a few artists-elicit admiration for the
national school and the individual celebrities it produced. But
William Blake invariably commands a different respect, for although
most of his contemporaries were accomplished in several media and
some even dabbled in writing verse or composing music, none produced
a body of work quite as radical in its meaning and intriguingly
unorthodox in its means as Blake's.  |
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