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Although today William Blake (1757-1827) is recognised as a visionary poet and artist, at the time of his death he was unknown except for his presumed insanity. This highly influential two-volume biography by the barrister Alexander Gilchrist, first published in 1863 and reissued here in its second edition (1880), rescued William Blake from almost complete obscurity. The accepted interpretation of his madness was challenged and his creative talents were brought to the attention of Victorian society by the inclusion of selected writings and artistic works, nearly all previously unpublished. Volume 1 of Gilchrist's book is an account of William Blake's life, combining excerpts from his written works and paintings with detailed biographical information drawn from surviving letters and contemporary accounts. ... Read more

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This short study draws on Blake's complete writings, his poetry and his prose. It offers a lively and perceptive account of his thought, ranging from his philosophy, his critique of existing society and culture, to his vision of a free world. Marshall presents Blake as a forerunner of modern anarchism and social ecology, and reveals the light which shines behind the misty mountain range (ahem) of his symbolism and mythology. ... Read more

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William Blake: The Painter at Work offers an innovative and revealing approach to one of the most individual of all British artists. Although the highly idiosyncratic nature of Blake's techniques has long been recognized, this is the first book to explore the practical methods behind his unique style--providing a fuller understanding of exactly how this secretive artist worked as a painter.

Richly illustrated with Blake's temperas, watercolors, and color prints and drawings, the book includes essays by leading international authorities who illuminate Blake's techniques and materials using up-to-the-minute research methods. Their analysis of numerous individual works reveals, for example, that Blake used essentially the same range of colors in them all, even if some of the more than 100 temperas he painted from 1799 to 1826 have since darkened or faded.

The book consists of four main sections. Introductory chapters are followed by essays on Blake's watercolors, large color prints, and temperas. An epilogue discusses the presentation of the paintings, and appendices provide more detail on the works discussed. The contributors are John Anderson, Peter Bower, Noa Cahaner McManus, John Dean, Robin Hamlyn, Bronwyn Ormsby, Brian Singer, Joyce H. Townsend, and Piers Townshend.

William Blake: The Painter at Work not only casts new light on the incomparable oeuvre that made Blake one of the most perennially popular of visual artists but also points to ways of preserving this work for future generations. There are still unanswered questions, but now there are answers too.Amazon.com Review
Conservation scientist Joyce H. Townsend is the Tate Museum's answer to coroner Gus Grissom on TV's CSI. Only instead of solving murders, she sleuths out the violence done to great art. In this book, she and her colleagues explain the horrors time, faded pigments, and dumb owners have visited on Blake's paintings, use a slew of high-tech techniques to deduce his methods and open our eyes to his original intentions. If you haven't read this book, you probably don't know what Blake's work looks like. Skillfully employing gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, lasers, Fourier transform infra-red spectrometry, and good old-fashioned saliva on a cotton swab, they scrub away dirt, yellowed varnish, and moronic overpaintings, and reveal how Blake wanted you to see. A tiny edge of blue indicates the firmament that Satan originally strode through in the now-yellowed Satan in His Original Glory. The chemical "Maillard reaction" has horribly browned The Ghost of a Flea; a small detail illustration reveals the original brilliant, star-studded blue Blake intended. The detective work is fascinating, and the profuse illustrations both technically and esthetically illuminating. Blake would have sung hosannas over this book: it cleanses the doors of perception. --Tim Appelo ... Read more

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indispensable
An indispenasable book for those interested in the latest research
on William Blake's techniques as an artist. ... Read more

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"Reader's Guides" provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts. William Blake is a romantic poet who remains popular today, in part because his exceptional insight into psychological, political and social issues remains powerfully relevant. The "Reader's Guide" begins by introducing Blake's major themes including religious, political and social issues and then moves on to reading key works, including "Songs of Innocence and Experience" and "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell". It offers an invaluable introduction to reading Blake's poetry and includes sections on its contexts, language and style, critical reception and adaptation and influence and finally, an annotated guide to further reading. ... Read more

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et in the tumultuous eighteenth century, this novel weaves fact and fiction to tell the story of Kate Blake, 'the perfect wife' for the notoriously strange William Blake. Young and innocent, Kate searches for her identity in the shadow of Blake's genius-and struggles to understand his bohemian world of un-con-ventional principles, visions, and free love. Other Sorrows, Other Joys is historical fiction at its best, in the lush tradition of Girl With a Pearl Earring and Possession. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Fine Historical & Literary Fiction
If there are people who know less about William Blake than I did, I have not met them yet. However, I'm a bit more informed now, thanks to Warner's very insightful and intense novel, written primarily in the voice of Wm.'s wife, Kate. I found myself thinking as I read this that Janet Warner may have been channeling Kate Blake, I felt that much in the presence of this wonderful, caring and intelligent woman.It was such a perfect way (for me, anyway) to begin a study of Blake, who is such a towering and often obscure figure, and one so very singular as to make me nervous at times.But Kate's there, mob cap on her head, running the press beside William, considering finances when William can't be bothered. In Warner's telling, theirs seems a marriage of Air and Earth.

I was saddened to learn that Janet Warner passed away last year, but was comforted at the thought of her being able to enjoy the satisfaction of having produced this fine and original work, in addition to all her other accomplishments. It is a wonderful book, she got what feels like just the right tone for Kate, and wove in all the things large and small, about her life and his, and theirs together.I am so glad I found this book.

A different take on William Blake
The poet-prophet Blake casts such an intense blaze, it's all too easy to forget his wife Catherine, who stood beside him, supported & aided in his work, and provided a home & haven for his visions. This fine novel rectifies that omission, letting Catherine tell her own story in warm, sympathetic, but clear-eyed prose. She gives us a wonderfully detailed, day-by-day look at the world Blake moved in -- its politics, its fads, its intrigues. And she also makes us realize that being the wife of such a man is often no easy task! Yes, Blake was a truly remarkable figure ... but Catherine was no less remarkable, as the reader will certainly come to agree. For those who love Blake's work, it's a welcome addition to the Blake bookshelf. But even for those who know nothing about him, it's both an introduction to the man & an excellent novel about a unique marriage in its own right. Well worth seeking out!
... Read more

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Product Description
et in the tumultuous eighteenth century, this novel weaves fact and fiction to tell the story of Kate Blake, 'the perfect wife' for the notoriously strange William Blake. Young and innocent, Kate searches for her identity in the shadow of Blake's genius-and struggles to understand his bohemian world of un-con-ventional principles, visions, and free love. Other Sorrows, Other Joys is historical fiction at its best, in the lush tradition of Girl With a Pearl Earring and Possession. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Fine Historical & Literary Fiction
If there are people who know less about William Blake than I did, I have not met them yet. However, I'm a bit more informed now, thanks to Warner's very insightful and intense novel, written primarily in the voice of Wm.'s wife, Kate. I found myself thinking as I read this that Janet Warner may have been channeling Kate Blake, I felt that much in the presence of this wonderful, caring and intelligent woman.It was such a perfect way (for me, anyway) to begin a study of Blake, who is such a towering and often obscure figure, and one so very singular as to make me nervous at times.But Kate's there, mob cap on her head, running the press beside William, considering finances when William can't be bothered. In Warner's telling, theirs seems a marriage of Air and Earth.

I was saddened to learn that Janet Warner passed away last year, but was comforted at the thought of her being able to enjoy the satisfaction of having produced this fine and original work, in addition to all her other accomplishments. It is a wonderful book, she got what feels like just the right tone for Kate, and wove in all the things large and small, about her life and his, and theirs together.I am so glad I found this book.

A different take on William Blake
The poet-prophet Blake casts such an intense blaze, it's all too easy to forget his wife Catherine, who stood beside him, supported & aided in his work, and provided a home & haven for his visions. This fine novel rectifies that omission, letting Catherine tell her own story in warm, sympathetic, but clear-eyed prose. She gives us a wonderfully detailed, day-by-day look at the world Blake moved in -- its politics, its fads, its intrigues. And she also makes us realize that being the wife of such a man is often no easy task! Yes, Blake was a truly remarkable figure ... but Catherine was no less remarkable, as the reader will certainly come to agree. For those who love Blake's work, it's a welcome addition to the Blake bookshelf. But even for those who know nothing about him, it's both an introduction to the man & an excellent novel about a unique marriage in its own right. Well worth seeking out!
... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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The core of William Blake's vision, his greatness as one of the British Romantics, is most fully expressed in his Illuminated Books, masterworks of art and text intertwined and mutually enriching. Made possible by recent advances in printing and reproduction technology, the publication of new editions of Jerusalem and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1991 was a major publishing event. Now these two volumes are followed by The Early Illuminated Books and Milton, A Poem. The books in both volumes are reproduced from the best available copies of Blake's originals and in faithfulness and accuracy match the acclaimed standards set by Jerusalem and Songs. These two volumes are uniform in format and binding with the first two volumes.

The Early Illuminated Books comprises All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion; Thel; Marriage of Heaven and Hell; and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Milton, A Poem, second only to Jerusalem in extent and ambition, is accompanied by Laocon, The Ghost of Abel, and On Homer's Poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Lots of helps for the general reader of this difficult lyric
The editors of this great work recognize its difficulties and that it is usually only the domain of specialists.They have filled to volume it commentary, notes, and helps to try and help the general reader to penetrate aspects of this extended poem / lyric / myth.The style is so personal to Blake and so unlike any other writer's style that it is hard for most of us to make sense of what each character means in any instance.A further difficulty is that there really isn't a narrative path or plot or much to help the reader move from one moment to the next.Blake had a view of reality has so multi-layered with each being having simultaneous multiple identities and manifestations that our normal way of viewing reality is quite useless.

The plates are beautifully reproduced with wonderful coloring and great images.It is a poem you can tackle as you wish, but plan on spending a lot of time thinking about it before it yields much to you.

For those readers who love Blake this is a great volume to add to your collection.

bet you never knew Milton was a ....!!!
I hate Blake.He and his Zoas and Los can go suck the ample breasts of Albion's emanation Jerusalem.At least Joyce (the only other person I know with this personal mythology splattered out for everyone) had a sense of humor.This guy, though.
Nevertheless, the illustrations are something, and there is something in the poem, I don't know exactly what it is (nor does anyone else, regardless of how convoluted and esoteric their arguments), but I'm convinced that in order to understand the least bit of these poems, you must read them all. Study them, in fact.The notes in this version are very good, and the extra illustrations are great, particularly the painting of Adam and Eve discovering Abel with Cain running off covering his newly marked forehead.Also, there is a large Lacoon, undoubtedly Blake's best thing. (I don't want to call it a poem, painting, or even "work" for some reason).

You don't know these people.
Try as I might, I haven't come up with the blend of radical individualism thwarted by universal awareness which would make this kind of book an intellectual treat for most people.I have read the poems by William Blake (just a few thousand lines, really) that are in this book before, and I even compared the abridged copy of his poems which I've had for years with a complete text from the library to discover what I could about the process of selection.Most of this is still a big mystery to a lot of people, and buying this book was my first attempt to get the whole picture of what a lot of professors might think about a single work, which is printed on plates numbered 1, then 1 to 8, 8*, 9 to 32, 32*, 33 to 46, then a Preface, copy B, plate 2, and even a plate f, followed by variations of the pictures which were on plate 13 and other Supplementary Illustrations.I had some trouble making out words on the colored plates, so the most educational part of the book for me is the printed text with notes from pages 111 to 217.

Milton is a great figure in English literature, and the great poems which place Satan and God in a struggle that makes Adam and Eve seem like minor characters are the intellectual context for Blake's effort to write a poem using Milton to write about things that minor characters wouldn't even want to talk about.Things don't really start happening for me until plate 12, "According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius/Who is the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity" that Milton actually rose up and said, "I go to Eternal Death!"Don't expect to meet anyone saying such things on our streets.This attempt to be instructive in the art of self-annihilation produces one of the great intellectual puzzles of eternal questions, which attempt not to apply to a particular place and time.My appreciation of John Milton and William Blake is more concerned with their ideas than with artistic techniques.The importance of Blake was suggested, more than it was demonstrated, by Theodore Roszak in THE MAKING OF A COUNTER CULTURE, Chapter VIII, "Eyes of Flesh, Eyes of Fire," which observes that a "perfectly sensible interpretation . . . would tell us, for example, that the poet Blake, under the influence of Swedenborgian mysticism, developed a style based on esoteric visionary correspondences . . . Etc.Etc.Footnote."(Roszak, p. 239).What really impressed me was the intellectual context established in the Bibliographical Notes, at the end of THE MAKING OF A COUNTER CULTURE, which states, "Anything Blake ever wrote seems supremely relevant to the search for alternative realities."(p. 302).The radical element of that thought needs to be understood in a way that affirms the religious significance of what Blake was trying to accomplish, and other scholars might overlook how this search in Blake's work might oppose their own assumptions about our cultural inheritance.Harold Bloom, in BLAKE'S APOCALYPSE, (1963, shortly before the radical part of the sixties) said "The dark Satanic Mills have nothing to do with industrialism, but" poetically pick the most common example for why those who are bored might want to complain of "The same dull round, even of a universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels."(Bloom, p. 305).There are a lot of names to explain, as Bloom does in his book, and the scholars employed by Tate Gallery Publications for the production of this book display an extraordinary amount of work on this project for that purpose, and the intellectual puzzles are what remains mysterious even after learning what knowledge is available.

At the heart of the poem, "Milton," is the question of what such a character might mean to William Blake, and how, long after Milton's death, he might be of some use.A lot of works have been written to give an author the opportunity to say something that he wouldn't have otherwise had a chance to say, and this book seems to be one of the unique cases of a work which tries to say something that no one else is saying.Instead of treating Milton like anyone who had been dead for more than a hundred years, the treatment of Milton's thought also supposes that it exists through an "Emanation, Sixfold presumably because he had three wives and three daughters."(Bloom, p. 308).Bloom thinks this book is a result of "a complex relation of responsibility to what he has made, though his creation is in torment because scattered through the creation."(p. 308).After John Milton had become blind, his wives and daughters represented a tremendous portion of his remaining contact with the world.

Walter Kaufmann, in LIFE AT THE LIMITS, considered a sonnet by the blind Milton about a dream in which one of his wives, who had died, was seen by him "Brought back to me like Alcestis from the grave."The reality expressed in the final line of that poem, "I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night," seemed to Kaufmann to be "the most powerful last line of any English short poem."(LIFE AT THE LIMITS, p. 75).Blake approached this situation, in which picturing another person might be considered the strongest link with any reality, with what modern readers might consider an unctiously religious picture on plate 15, with the caption (explained on p. 139 with, "The giving up of selfhood to achieve a more inclusive sense of self is essential for the artist to create" which isn't so scary if it is only applied to artists and monks):"To annihilate the Self-[there is a foot here in the picture]-hood of Deceit & False Forgiveness."Then plate 16 starts with "In those three females whom his Wives, & those three whom his Daughters/Had represented and containd.that they might be resume'd / By giving up of Selfhood:"This poetic division of a single poet into six male-female relationships is the most surprising thing in the poem, for me.Trying to apply it to religion states a much more radical understanding of what religion has to offer than most people expect if they merely go to church, which seems to be one of Roszak's points about how our culture accepts religion by making it strictly mainstream, totally "God Bless America" as the most popular current phrase goes.Much of the scholarship on the creation of Blake's large works notes how uncommercial it was in Blake's day, as "Hayley discouraged him from anything other than `the meer drudgery of business' (p. 14)" and this book tries to make that picture perfectly clear.

In one of the few small works at the end of this book, Blake complained:

The Classics, it is the Classics! / & not Goths nor Monks, that / Desolate Europe with Wars.(p. 264)

I feel the same way, complaining about some books, but Blake assumed a society in which people were actually being taught things like a Platonic belief in forms, and the Classics were a large element of what seemed bad to him.He might have felt differently if he ever had a chance to observe our formless void, where any claim to wisdom is highly suspect.We can only look the other way.

ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE
Princeton University Press has thoroughly impressed me with this series. Using higher quality paper than I've ever seen in publishing, along with an unheard-of *six* color printing process, they have reproduced the colorslike never before. In addition to the color plates, a full reprint of thetext is included in typescript, as well as informed and thoughtfulcommentary. Well done! Too bad the hardback is out of print (or was at thetime of this review). ... Read more

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receives a beautiful and powerful rendition in a series of vibrant images, each showing only a portion of the entire animal, which is fully revealed in a final four-page gatefold illustration. ... Read more

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Poetic Justice
I was introduced to this picture book in my Children's Literature class. The illustrations are vivid and thought provoking. This book is a beautiful extension of William Blake's classic poem and I reccommend it for childrenof all ages. ... Read more

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22 engravings reproduced from proofs of the first edition and interpreted by a renowned Blake scholar. ... Read more