William Blake: The Visionary Who Drew the Divine

William Blake (1757–1827) was not understood by his contemporaries. He was dismissed as a madman, a minor eccentric, a curiosity. A century after his death he was recognized as one of the most original minds in the history of Western art and literature — a poet, painter, engraver, and visionary who spent his entire life in London working in deliberate isolation from the aesthetic fashions of his time, producing a body of illuminated books, watercolors, and engravings that constitute the most sustained attempt in the Western tradition to give visual form to spiritual realities directly perceived. Blake was not depicting metaphors or allegories. He was recording what he saw. From childhood, he reported visions: angels in a tree, the prophet Ezekiel on the ground, God's face at the window. As an adult he conversed with spirits, was visited by historical figures, and received dictation from supernatural beings he described as his "spiritual friends." Whether these experiences were psychotic, visionary, or some genuinely different mode of perception that modern categories cannot accommodate is a question that each viewer of his work must answer individually — the work itself neither explains nor apologizes. It simply shows what Blake saw.

The Ancient of Days (frontispiece to Europe: A Prophecy, 1794) — the figure of Urizen (Blake's embodiment of limiting reason and false law) reaching down from a sun disk to measure the void with golden compasses; this image, Blake's most famous, encodes his critique of Newtonian rationalism: the universe reduced to geometry by a blind demiurge who mistakes his own constructions for ultimate reality

Newton (1795-c.1805) — the physicist crouched at the ocean floor, using compasses to inscribe a diagram on a scroll, oblivious to the rich world of color and life surrounding him; Blake's Newton is not a hero of reason but a figure of tragic limitation — a man so committed to measuring that he cannot perceive what cannot be measured; the 'single vision and Newton's sleep' that Blake explicitly associated with spiritual death

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (c.1805) — from Blake's series illustrating the Book of Revelation; the Dragon (the devouring ego, the false selfhood) towers over the Woman (spiritual vision, the divine feminine); Blake's color monoprints achieved a density and luminosity unavailable in conventional watercolor, the pigment pressed into the paper's texture to create surfaces that glow from within

The Ghost of a Flea (c.1819-1820) — Blake claimed this image was dictated to him by the ghost of a flea, which appeared to him during a séance and explained that fleas are inhabited by the souls of bloodthirsty men; the figure's armored scales, its bowl of blood, its tongue — this is not fantasy but reportage; Blake was recording what appeared to him with the same fidelity a naturalist applies to an observed specimen

Jerusalem, Plate 51 (c.1820) — from Blake's final and most ambitious prophetic book; Jerusalem is simultaneously a woman, a city, a state of spiritual freedom, and the divine humanity that Blake believed was the true nature of reality; the 100 plates of Jerusalem constitute the most sustained visual-poetic statement of a mystical philosophy in the English tradition

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (c.1786) — an early work showing the fairy world that Blake experienced as literally real; the fairies are not charming decorations but inhabitants of a spiritual dimension interpenetrating the physical world; Blake reported seeing fairy funerals in his garden; his wife confirmed that she had seen them too

Europe Supported by Africa and America (1796) — from John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition; Blake engraved many commercial illustrations during his life and used them as vehicles for his own vision; this image of three women representing the continents carries a political charge (the abolitionist Stedman was documenting slavery in Surinam) that Blake's composition amplifies into a statement about the interdependence of all human freedom

Frontispiece to The Song of Los (1795) — a figure prostrate before a radiant sun disk; Los is Blake's personification of the poetic imagination, the principle that resists the materialism of Urizen; the Songs of Los together with The Book of Urizen constitute Blake's mythological counter-history of humanity's fall into material consciousness and its possible redemption through vision

The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve (c.1825) — the discovery of the first murder; Blake's interpretation of Genesis consistently identifies the fall not with disobedience but with the reduction of spiritual vision to material sight; Cain's murder of Abel, in Blake's reading, is the first act of Urizen's world — the domination of the living by the dead categories of law and judgment

Lot and His Daughters (c.1800) — the scene above Sodom's destruction; Blake's late biblical watercolors show the full maturity of his visual imagination: the complex figure groupings, the turbulent sky, the combination of the specific and the cosmic; these works were largely unknown in Blake's lifetime and were not exhibited until the 20th century

The Minotaur, from Blake's Dante illustrations (1824-1827) — Blake spent the last three years of his life illustrating the Divine Comedy for the patron John Linnell; he produced 102 watercolors, the most ambitious project of his career; he died before finishing them; his response to Dante was characteristically independent — he disagreed with Dante's theology but recognized in him a fellow visionary who had genuinely seen what he described