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William Blake
Birth Year : 1757
Death Year : 1827
Country : United Kingdom
William Blake, poet, engraver, painter, and mystic,
was born and lived almost his entire life in
London. He was apprenticed to an engraver at the
age of fourteen and began to write and publish his
own books when he was twenty-six. His most famous
book of poems, "Songs of Innocence", appeared in
1789. It was written, printed, engraved, and bound
by the artist himself, with the aid of his wife.
Although Blake never left England, he studied the
work of Michelangelo and the Italian Mannerists
from a large collection of engravings, and he was
one of several artists influenced by John Henry
Fuseli, an Anglo-Swiss painter who worshiped
Shakespeare and Michelangelo,. Blake, for his part,
was devoted to the Bible, to Dante, and to Milton.
He also admired the medieval period and conceived
of his own books as eighteenth-century successors
to the illuminated manuscripts of the medieval
monks.
His work is religious or mystical in expression and
romantic in spirit. It is full of movement,
flickering or glaring light, medieval symbols, and
mannerist musculature and arrangement. Blake was
noted for his scrupulous honesty and resisted all
offers of patronage by the rich, preferring to work
in poverty and independence. He was comparatively
unknown in England until 1818, when one of his
disciples, John Linnell, organized a group who
bought Blake's drawings and helped secure
commissions for The Book of Job and The Devine
Comedy. Blake died before the latter was completed,
having engraved only seven of the one hundred
watercolours he had made for the book. |
William Blake
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