Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

Discussion

Vol. 51 no. 2: Fall 2017

Adam and Eve Asleep: A Dissent

  • David Bindman
DOI
https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.200
Submitted
29 September 2017
Published
29 Sep. 2017

Abstract

In a Minute Particular in the last Blake, “Blake’s Unfinished Series of Illustrations to Paradise Lost for John Linnell: An Addition,” Martin Butlin published a new Blake Milton watercolor, Adam and Eve Asleep, and I would like to comment on it briefly. I should say that Martin Butlin was my PhD advisor, or Doktorvater, and remains a dear friend. He is, as everyone knows, a great Blake scholar who has sorted out Blake’s artistic oeuvre in a magnificent two-volume work, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. All this is to say that it pains me greatly to dissent from his conclusions about the watercolor, which I do not believe to be in Blake’s hand.