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William Blake: A Harmony of Philosophy and Craft
From: The British Library
| By:
Michael Phillips |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Dr. Michael Phillips teaches an interdisciplinary course at York University to graduate students of seventeenth and eighteenth century studies. Himself a professional printmaker, Dr. Phillips takes an historicist approach to Blake, asking us to take into account the materials Blake used for his work, the context in which his work was distributed, his artistic methods, and other conditions under which he worked.
Blake's support of human rights and freedoms was expressed through his writing on the French Revolution, as well as through his reinterpretations of Christian ideology, and his reappropriation of traditional figures to new visual contexts. Credited as the forefather of modern British painting, Blake was unique in rejecting the prescribed neo-classical conventions for the purpose of art. At the same time, his insistence on lyrical and visual invention beginning with a tabula rasa owed a debt to the new empiricism propounded by Locke and was very much of his time. |
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| Blake called his new method Illuminated Printing. | |
 lake's method of relief etching both text and design on a single copper plate dispensed with the complex conventional means of illustrated book production of his day. Joseph Ritson's A Select Collection of English Songs, published by Joseph. Johnson in 1783, is representative of what was involved and the part that Blake played and earned his living by. The text of the poems was printed from the raised or relief surfaces of cast lead type composed in formes and printed on a common hand-powered wooden screw press. For an octavo like A Select Collection of English Songs, eight pages would be set and printed on each side of a single sheet. But, as the copper plate illustrating the text was engraved in intaglio, with the lines cut below the surface and filled with ink, it had to be printed under great pressure in a copper plate rolling press. In other words, to produce a page printed in letterpress with an engraved illustration required two fundamentally different kinds of specialised printing and the careful organisation and management of the entire procedure by the bookseller. For Johnson, this entailed obtaining the manuscript from Ritson, editing it in preparation for the letterpress printer, marking the page layout for illustration, hiring Thomas Stothard to make the designs and Blake to engrave them. When everything was ready, the edited text was delivered to the letter press workshop where the text was printed, then the printed sheets and engraved copper plates were delivered to the copper plate printers, where they were printed. Returned to Johnson, the sheets were collated, folded, gathered, pressed and sewn into paper wrappers and priced roughly twice the cost of materials and labour ready for publication and sale." By writing his own text, making his own designs and etching them together in relief so that the entire page could be printed from the same surface, Blake placed himself in sole charge of each step in the creation, reproduction, pricing and publication of his illuminated books, apart from making the paper. |
But tile invention that Blake described as Illuminated Printing was something more. On Plate 14 of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell he signifies his method: |
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. |
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| Blake inverted traditional intaglio etching. | |
Blake's method is symbolic of his philosophy of mind, of a deeply held belief in the existence of innate ideas and vehement opposition to the philosophical empiricism that dominated his age, in particular as expressed by John Locke An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: |
Let us then suppose the Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without Ideas; How comes it to be furnished? [...] to this I answer, in one word. From Experience. In that, all our Knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives it self." |
Blake had read Locke's Essay 'when very Young.' His opposition to its principles and to all who upheld them was uncompromising: |
Reynolds Thinks that Man learns all that he Knows I say on the Contrary That Man Brings all that he has or Can have Into the World with him, Man is Born Like a Garden ready Planted & Sown. |
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| Blake's Republicanism was at the heart of his work. | |
For a man of Blake's training and beliefs, the analogy between Locke's metaphor for the human mind as tabula rasa, a blank slate, and a copper plate prepared for conventional intaglio etching and engraving would have been apparent." Its contrary, etching in relief by biting the surfaces of the copper away to reveal from within poetry and design, similarly would have been appreciated as a corresponding metaphor for the existence of innate ideas, for the divine within man awakened and raised to life. |
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