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...