Rachel Mak, Photography Editor
Though students often encounter William Blake in English classes, where they spend semesters poring over his Romantic poetry, his work extended beyond verse. With the help of his wife, Blake wrote, illustrated and pressed his own poetry.
Since Aug. 26, some of those illustrations have been on display in the Yale Center for British Art’s latest exhibition. “William Blake: Burning Bright” invites students, professors and the public to engage with Yale’s vast collection.
The exhibit — accompanied by a new publication, lecture and English seminar — invites viewers to explore Blake’s rich mysticism. With over 900 of Blake’s works in the collection, the museum is offering a rare look into the artist’s unique mind and method.
“His work is at once tumultuous, foreboding, and joyous, and in these complexities it still connects with us now. We are thrilled to show our rich holdings and invite visitors to experience Blake’s jewellike works from our collection firsthand,” Martina Droth, the director of the Yale Center for British Art, said in a press release.
Blake has become a seminal figure in British and global cultural history, according to the exhibit’s educational artwork descriptions.
The new exhibition pays homage to Blake and his singularly fascinating works, created either in spite of or in part by his eccentric and fantastical imagination.
Writing, engraving and painting in a time of unparalleled political and social upheaval, in the midst of the American and French Revolutions, Blake contended with the infinitely complex world around him.
“I was intrigued by the tensions the exhibit portrays and how his work highlights a period of discordance between major institutions,” Natalia Armas Perez ’28, who viewed the exhibit soon after its opening, said. “I’m glad the exhibit shed light on the different ways he portrayed his view of a very tumultuous time period.”
Blake started his career through an engraving apprenticeship, giving him the technical expertise required for his greater designs.
“He really, from an early age, was possessed of this vision of what he wanted his art to look like, and so he was an equal poet and artist, and also, he had the skills to make a book,” Timothy Young, one of the curators of the exhibit, said.
Although his works and skill only earned him modest fame and notoriety in his lifetime, Blake became a mythical figure to art historians and English scholars alike over the course of the next century.
Yale owes its extensive Blake collection to Paul Mellon, Yale College class of 1929, an early collector of his work and the founding benefactor of the Center for British Art.
“In terms of the exhibition and how we thought about putting it together, we wanted visitors to really get a sense of Blake and the idea that he really was a poet, a painter and a printmaker,” Elizabeth Wyckoff, another curator of the exhibit, said.
From hundreds of works, the curators selected a portion to demonstrate the evolution of Blake’s projects and styles over his decades-long career.
Walking into the exhibit, one encounters an early work of Blake’s, a page from “The Gates of Paradise,” written for children.
Wyckoff said the curators’ goal was “to really draw people in and have people lean in closely, but also to think of him as an innovator and very inventive in terms of technique.”
Next, the exhibit showcases various poems from arguably the most notable of Blake’s works, “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” of which Yale holds three copies.
In these works, Blake perfects his “infernal method,” mastering the pen, the brush and the interaction between the two on the page. Unlike the engravers of his day, Blake inverted the process. Using a chemical reaction and copper plate, Blake was able to create unique pieces of reproducible illustrations, allowing him and his wife to watercolor and tinker with color in successive versions.
“Songs of Innocence and Experience” contains some of Blake’s most well-known works, such as “The Tyger” and “The Lamb,” known not only for its beautiful designs but also for its edifying poetry.
“He’s still working with this idea of how the world both educates us but also gets really heavy as we get older,” Young said.
Moving forward through his career, a viewer can inspect Yale’s copies of Blake’s “America a Prophecy” and “The Book of Urizen.”
Blake’s increasingly intricate ecosystem of mythology, politics and philosophy is manifested on the intricately illuminated pages.
“Blake made these in order to efface the separation of verbal art and graphic art. And for the ‘Prophecies,’ where the pictures can be appreciated just by themselves, they seem to be a counterpoint to the sort of dire, poetic view that he has of the world,” emeritus English professor Richard Brodhead ’68 GRD ’72, the former Yale College dean who served as the museum’s interim director before Droth’s appointment, said.
In the museum’s renovated space, the curators have compiled a selection of Blake’s commission to illustrate and format older English poetry. In these one-of-a-kind compositions, Blake delves fully into the capricious and fanciful style for which he has since become immortalized.
Finally, from the apotheosis of Blake’s side-by-side panels are on display of “Jerusalem” and historical commissions of scenes from Dante and Chaucer.
Young called “Jerusalem” a “master culmination of his storytelling. It is the ultimate meeting of good and evil, past and present, and of growth and decay.”
In visual conversation with “The Gates of Paradise,” Blake’s first work, viewers find another miniature, signature work of Blake, made near the end of his life.
The exhibit provides a vivid portrait of Blake, whose fantastical reputation often obfuscates his work as a gifted author, talented watercolorist and enterprising innovator.
William Blake lived from 1757 to 1827.
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