publications

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of America a Prophecy Copies B and I. Ten of the fourteen extant copies of America were printed in 1793, the date on its title plate. Copy I, now in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, is from this printing. The eighteen plates of Copy I, like those of the other 1793 copies but unlike those of the later copies, were printed on two sides of the leaves, except for the frontispiece and title page (plates 1 and 2), and left uncolored. The plates were printed in greenish-black ink; five lines at the end of the text on plate 4 were masked and did not print, and plate 13 is in its first state. Copy B was printed in 1795 with copy A in the same brownish black ink on one side of the paper, with plate 13 in its second state. Unlike Copy A, however, it is uncolored except for gray wash on the title plate. Now in the Morgan Library and Museum, Copy B has a very curious history. Its plates 4 and 9, which were long assumed to be original, are in fact lithographic facsimiles from the mid 1870s produced to complete the copy. For a full technical description and history of this copy, see Joseph Viscomi, “Two Fake Blakes Revisited; One Dew-Smith Revealed,” Blake in Our Time: Essays in Honour of G. E. Bentley, Jr. Ed. Karen Mulhallen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 35-78. Copies B and I join six other copies in the Archive, Copies E and F (1793), A (1795), M (c. 1807), and O (1821), which altogether represent the full printing history of this illuminated book.

America Copy B, object 13, detail (© Morgan Library and Museum)

America a Prophecy was the first of Blake’s “Continental Prophecies,” followed by Europe a Prophecy in 1794, executed in the same style and size but usually colored, and, in 1795, “Africa” and “Asia,” two sections making up The Song of Los. Fine and important examples of all three books are in the Archive. Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of America Copies B and I are fully searchable and are supported by the Archive’s Compare feature. New protocols for transcription, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors’ notes, have been applied to copies B and I and to all the America texts previously published.

With the publication of these two copies, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 85 copies of Blake’s nineteen illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important manuscripts and series of engravings, color printed drawings, tempera paintings, and water color drawings.

Due to recent security concerns related to Java browser plugins, the Archive has disabled its Java-based ImageSizer and Virtual Lightbox applications. Users can still view 100 and 300 dpi JPEG images as well as complete transcriptions for all works in the Archive including America Copies B and I. Text searching is also still available for all works in the Archive, and image searching remains available for all works except those in preview mode. In the coming months the Archive will implement redesigned pages that restore the features of ImageSizer and the Virtual Lightbox without the use of Java.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of an electronic edition of five of Blake’s tempera paintings on biblical subjects, eleven of his water color illustrations to the Bible, and one of his large color printed drawings, Hecate, or The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy. These works have been added to groups previously published. In addition, we have republished all the biblical temperas and water colors to add illustration descriptions and make their designs and inscriptions fully searchable.

The Bible had an enormous influence on Blake’s work as both artist and poet. His tempera paintings and water colors of biblical subjects, mostly created for his patron Thomas Butts beginning in 1799, are among Blake’s most important responses to that text. The tempera paintings now published are based on passages in the New Testament concerning the life of Jesus and his family. We are particularly pleased to include Christ Raising Jairus’s Daughter, a well preserved but little known work recently acquired by the Mead Art Museum of Amherst College. The new group of water colors ranges from Numbers (Moses Striking the Rock) to two of Blake’s most powerful explorations of the apocalyptic sublime, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun and The Number of the Beast is 666, both based on Revelation. The Great Red Dragon from the Brooklyn Museum has received a good deal of contemporary attention because of its central role in Thomas Harris’s bestselling 1981 novel, Red Dragon, and the films of 1986 and 2002 based on it. The Archive now includes twenty-four tempera paintings and sixty-four water colors based on the Bible. All of Blake’s extant water color illustrations to Revelation are available.

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (© Brooklyn Museum)

The publication of Hecate from the National Gallery of Scotland completes our presentation of Blake’s large color printed drawings, considered by some to be his greatest achievements as a pictorial artist. The Archive now contains all thirty traced impressions of the twelve subjects portrayed in the large color prints.

This publication includes works from several collections not previously represented in the Archive. Accordingly, we are also publishing Blake collection lists for the Brooklyn Museum, Mead Art Museum (Amherst College), National Gallery of Scotland, Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, and Rosenbach Museum and Library. These lists include all original works by Blake in their respective collections, not just those published in the Archive.

With this publication we have also implemented a technical improvement that reflects the Archive’s commitment to open-source digital humanities principles. By clicking on the “View XML Source File” link on Electronic Edition Information pages, users can now view the XML source code for any work in the Archive.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of Songs of Innocence Copy G, from the Yale Center for British Art, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience Copy N, from the Huntington Library and Art Gallery.

Songs of Innocence Copy G, object 2

Innocence Copy G was printed with fifteen others in the book’s first printing in 1789.  Four of these copies were later joined with Experience impressions, printed in 1794, to form Songs of Innocence and of Experience Copies B, C, E, which are in the Archive, and D. Copy G also joins Innocence Copies B and U and will be joined in the coming years by eleven more separately printed copies of Innocence that are currently in production.  Unlike many of these early copies of Innocence, Copy G still consists of all 31 plates originally composed and executed for Innocence. The plates were printed in yellow ochre ink on 17 leaves and wiped of their plate borders; the designs were very lightly washed in watercolors and the texts left unwashed. These borderless designs, printed on both sides of the leaves to create facing pages, look more like illuminated manuscripts than prints or paintings. This mode of presentation exemplifies Blake’s early printing and coloring style. Using the Archive’s Compare feature, which enables users to juxtapose impressions from the same illuminated plate printed in different periods, users of the Archive can contrast this early style to Blake’s late style, c. 1818-1827. For example, in Songs of Innocence and of Experience Copies V, Y, Z, and AA, which are in the Archive, Blake printed and finished the impressions to look like miniature paintings.

After 1794, the printing history of Innocence becomes complex because Blake began printing it with Experience to form copies of the combined Songs while continuing also to issue Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience separately. Complicating matters further are the facts that some separately issued copies of Innocence were combined with Experience by collectors and dealers, and that copies of Innocence now separate were once part of copies of the combined Songs. Copy N of Songs of Innocence and of Experience contains 25 plates, all from Songs of Experience.  These are numbered by Blake 30 to 54, thus indicating that the copy once included Songs of Innocence.  This may have been what is now called Copy W of Songs of Innocence, untraced since 1941. The Experience impressions of Songs Copy N were printed with plate borders in brownish-black ink on one side of the leaf and finished in water color washes and pen and ink outlining. This is an intermediate printing and coloring style, between the earliest styles as represented by Innocence Copy G and the color printed works of 1794 and late style, c. 1818-1827.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience Copy N, object 1

Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the texts and images of Innocence Copy G and Experience of Songs Copy N are fully searchable and are supported by our Virtual Lightbox and ImageSizer applications. In addition to the Archive’s Compare feature, users can use the Lightbox to juxtapose and examine images from any of the works in the Archive side by side, as well as crop, zoom, and juxtapose them for close study.

New protocols for transcriptions, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors’ notes, have been applied to Innocence Copy G and Experience of Songs Copy N and to all the Innocence and Songs texts previously published. With the publication of these two copies, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 83 copies of Blake’s nineteen illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important manuscripts and series of engravings, color printed drawings, tempera paintings, and water color drawings.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of an electronic edition of Blake’s etchings/engravings of John Flaxman’s Compositions from the Works Days and Theogony of Hesiod (1817). Both the designs and the inscribed texts are fully searchable.

The thirty-seven Hesiod plates are one of Blake’s major endeavors as a commercial etcher/engraver of designs by other artists. Flaxman began to sketch designs based on Hesiod’s poems in the early 1790s, but it was not until February 1816 that he entered into a contract with Longman & Co. to compose a series of illustrations for publication. Blake had already been commissioned to execute the plates, almost certainly on the recommendation of Flaxman, a friend of many years. The publisher began to receive proof impressions in November 1814; the project was completed by January 1817. Blake, who received very few other engraving commissions during this period, was paid 5 guineas (£5.5s.) for each plate, a total of £194.5s. Without the Hesiod project, Blake and his wife Catherine might have descended into dire poverty.

Blake executed the Hesiod illustrations in an unusual graphic style. Rather than continuous outlines, found in the engravings of Flaxman’s other classical compositions, Blake used stippled lines—that is, lines composed of dots. It is surprising to see Blake, who wrote in a letter of 1827 that “a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivision[s],” deploying a technique that divides lines into points. Perhaps he was responding to the character of Flaxman’s preliminary drawings, now untraced, upon which the etchings/engravings were based. If these were in soft pencil, then stippled lines would be an appropriate equivalent. It is also possible that Flaxman or his publisher directed Blake to use this style.

Flaxman’s classical compositions were influenced by, and often understood as recreations of, Greek and Etruscan vase paintings. His illustrations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and of Dante’s Divine Comedy were published, or at least engraved, in 1793. They soon became famous and highly influential throughout Europe. These were followed by designs for the tragedies of Aeschylus in 1795 and Blake’s Hesiod engravings in 1817. Blake also contributed three plates to the 1805 revised publication of the Iliad illustrations; these are forthcoming in the Archive.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors

Ashley Reed, project manager; William Shaw, technical editor

The William Blake Archive

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of the electronic edition of Europe a Prophecy Copy D, from the British Museum. Europe, extant in nine copies, is dated 1794 on its title plate. The first six copies were color printed that year; four of these copies were printed on both sides of the leaves and two were printed on one side only. Copy D belongs to the former issue and joins in the Archive Copies E and G from the same issue and Copy B, more heavily color printed, from the latter. It also joins Copy H, the only monochrome copy printed by Blake, produced in 1795, and Copy K, from the last printing session, c. 1821. With each printing session represented in the Archive, users can trace the full printing history of Europe.

A unique feature of Europe Copy D is the pen and ink inscriptions in the hand of Blake’s friend George Cumberland. These are quotations from a number of literary works, apparently added as glosses on the designs, and constitute one of the few contemporary responses to the pictorial images in Blake’s illuminated books. Ozias Humphry, the first owner of copy D, apparently lent the volume to Cumberland, who copied most of the inscriptions from Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry. With our “Related Works in the Archive” feature in the Show Me menu on the object view pages, users can access the untrimmed sheets with their marginal inscriptions and close ups of each inscription. Blake also executed for Humphry the Large and Small Book of Designs in 1796, published in the Archive in February 2012.

Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of Europe Copy D are fully searchable and are supported by our Virtual Lightbox and ImageSizer applications. With the Archive’s Compare feature, users can easily juxtapose multiple impressions of any plate across the different copies of this or any of the other illuminated books, and with the Lightbox, users can examine images from any of the works side by side, as well as crop, zoom, and juxtapose them for close study.

New protocols for transcriptions, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors’ notes, have been applied to Copy D and to all the Europe texts previously published. With the publication of Europe Copy D the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 81 copies of Blake’s nineteen illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important manuscripts and series of engravings, color printed drawings, tempera paintings, and water color drawings.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors

Ashley Reed, project manager

William Shaw, technical editor

The William Blake Archive

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of Blake’s Small Book of Designs copy A and Large Book of Designs copy A; the republication of Blake’s large color printed drawings of 1795, with five additional impressions and all of them now searchable; and the addition to the Blake Collection Lists of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts—31 contributing institutions altogether. The Archive now also features newly revised textual transcriptions for Blake’s descriptions of his illustrations to Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” as well as updated Help documentation that reflects the launch of the Virtual Lightbox and recent improvements to the Archive’s search engines.

The Small Book and Large Book were commissioned in 1796 by Ozias Humphry, a renowned miniaturist painter, and are now in the British Museum. The Small Book consists of 23 plates from The First Book of Urizen, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Thel, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Blake masked the texts on these relief-etched plates and beautifully color printed the designs on 26 x 19 cm. leaves of Whatman paper. The Large Book consists of eight color printed impressions pulled from etchings (Albion rose and The Accusers of Theft, Adultery, Murder) and relief etchings, including plates from Visions and Urizen and the separate relief plates of America a Prophecy plate d and Joseph of Arimathea Preaching, on the same type of paper, cut to 34.5 x 24.5 cm. With the Archive’s Compare feature, users can examine the prints in the Small and Large Books of Designs with impressions from the illuminated books in the Archive. The Small Book and Large Book can be found in the Archive by moving through the following categories: Table of Contents >Works in the Archive >Separate Prints and Prints in Series >Designed and Engraved by Blake.

The Small Book was literally a book, its leaves bound through three stab holes, but the Large Book is a “book” only by analogy, for its leaves were neither stabbed nor, apparently, bound. Aesthetically, the Books grew out of Blake’s twelve large color printed drawings of 1795. Although at least one of the designs, God Judging Adam, shows evidence of having been color printed from a copperplate etched in relief, the other eleven appear to have been painted within pen and ink outlines on gessoed millboards (a thick cardboard) and printed onto large sheets of damp wove paper using a rolling press. From such a prepared matrix Blake was often able to print two impressions (a first and second pull) without repainting the matrix, and he finished all impressions in watercolors and pen and ink. He appears to have produced thirty impressions from the twelve designs in at least two printings, c. 1795 and c. 1804-05. No design has more than three extant impressions. As with the illuminated books, each impression is different due to variations in color printing and finishing. For a full technical description of Blake’s large color prints and their relation to the illuminated books and Small and Large Books of Designs, see Joseph Viscomi, “Blake’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’: the Productions of 1795,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (Fall, 2007): 52-83.

The Archive has already published in its Preview Mode a selection of 23 impressions of the large color printed drawings (at least one impression of each) and the small version of Pity printed from a different matrix. With this republication, the Archive adds five impressions of five designs: Newton (Lutheran Church in America), never before reproduced in color, God Judging Adam (Philadelphia Museum of Art), Nebuchadnezzar (Minneapolis Institute of Arts), Satan Exulting over Eve (Tate Collection), and Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah to Return to the Land of Moab (Fitzwilliam Museum). The Archive now contains all extant impressions of the twelve designs except the last impression of Hecate, or the Night of Enitharmon’s Joy, in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, which declined the Archive’s request for a high-resolution image. With this republication, all the impressions of the color printed drawings are searchable and their illustration descriptions accessible, enabling users to engage in detailed, specific, and reliable searches of motifs, objects, subjects, and gestures.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors

Ashley Reed, project manager

William Shaw, technical editor

The William Blake Archive