Collection: William Blake

William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Born and largely resident in London, he spent three years in Felpham. Blake trained as an engraver and watercolour artist, becoming a seminal figure in the history of poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. His work, often unrecognised during his lifetime, templated the modern artist through its intricate, mythical universe.

Blake constructed a symbolically rich collection of works, embracing imagination as "the body of God" or "human existence itself." He developed a unique method of "illuminated printing," combining text and images on copper plates, which his wife Catherine Boucher assisted in colouring and printing. His "prophetic works," such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, explored philosophical and mystical undercurrents. Blake's idiosyncratic views and hostility to organised religion made him difficult to classify by contemporaries.

Considered mad by some contemporaries, Blake's expressiveness and creativity gained high regard from later critics. His paintings and poetry are characterised as part of the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic," influencing subsequent generations. The 19th-century scholar William Michael Rossetti described him as "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors."