¹ William Blake, annotations to William Wordsworth’s “Preface” to The Excursion.  Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. Erdman, 667 (hereafter cited as “E” followed by page number).

² The one-pull method is described in Essick, Printmaker 125-35, and Viscomi, Idea 119-28.  As Phillips (103 and 120n31) points out, W. Graham Robertson (in Gilchrist 404-06) had previously suggested (or at least implied) that Blake used the two-pull method.  However, Robertson is addressing only the technique Blake used for his large color prints, first designed and executed in 1795, not the color prints in the illuminated books.  Phillips also notes that Martin Butlin was “convinced” (103) of the two-pull theory.  Indeed, Butlin at least suggests as much, without explanatory details, in William Blake 48, Paintings and Drawings of Blake 1:156, and “Physicality” 5.  Phillips 120n31 also cites Butlin and Gott "p. 111"; but in that section of the catalogue, signed by Gott alone, Gott states explicitly that “both sets of tints” (i.e., the ink and the color-printing medium) were “printed … together” in one pull (111).  Raymond Lister (not cited by Phillips) implies a two-pull theory in his comment that the color prints in the Large and Small Book of Designs were “colour-printed on the base of impressions from relief-etched plates, instead of being colour-printed from the beginning” (61).

³ The Tate Britain exhibition labels for items 119b and 205 (Lucifer and the Pope in Hell and Visions of the Daughters of Albion frontispiece) implied  (as in Lister 61) that color-printed intaglio etchings and relief etchings for the Large and Small Book of Designs were printed in 1794 in monochrome and then reprinted two years later in colors.

⁴ How Blake identified The Book of Ahania  (1795) and The Book of Los (1795), in which the text pages were printed from intaglio plates, is not known.  Today they are routinely classified as illuminated books, perhaps because of their color-printed frontispieces, title pages, and vignettes.  All copies of Gates, however, were printed in black ink and left uncolored.

⁵ Monochrome impressions, whether printed in shades of black ink, such as those in most copies of America  (and, later, Jerusalem) or in colored inks, such as those in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copy B (1790) and the Experience section of Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy O, were produced and sold as monochrome copies and should not be considered unfinished.  Copy designations and plate numbers for the illuminated books follow Bentley, Books.

⁶ Laurie’s method combined on one plate mezzotint, stipple, and, for the outlines, etching, which he inked warm with camel hair brushes with their tips cut off to form stump brushes.  He was awarded 30 guineas by the Society of Arts in 1776 for the invention of this color printing method (see Burch 87 and Hardie 56-57).

⁷ For the concept of graphic “syntax,” see Ivins, esp. 60-62, and Gascoigne, where the identifying characteristics of all the various relief, intaglio, and planographic processes are clearly described and illustrated in magnified details.

⁸ According to Landseer, “The pretensions of engraving, as of all the arts denominated Fine, are simple, chaste, unsophisticated.  Art ever disdains artifice, attempts no imposition, but honestly claims attention as being what it is.  A Statue is to be looked at as being a statue—not a real Figure; a Picture, not as a portion of actual Nature; a Print, not as a copy of Painting” (178).

⁹ Landseer 182-83.  He goes on to claim that only “the eye, the hand, and the judgment of a Painter, can alone confer value on a coloured work of art—call it picture, print, or whatever you please: nothing else can entitle it to the denomination of a work of Art.”  Finishing, of course, also required the “genuine Painter, who (even were he to be well paid for it) could never submit to stifle his inventive powers in the drudgery of copying his own works, while by multiplying them, he lessened the nominal value of each” (183).

¹⁰ The first book in England with color prints was the Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Heraldry, printed in 1486 in St. Albans, Hertfordshire (Friedman 4).  Jackson’s was technically the second book in England with color prints.  In the latter half of the eighteenth century, aquatint plates with etched outlines replaced the key and tone blocks, making the facsimilizing of wash drawings a relatively simple one-pull procedure, as Richard Earlom’s facsimiles of Claude Lorraine’s and Giovanni Cipriani’s drawings attest.  French graphic artists like Gilles Demarteau used the chiaroscuro method with aquatints (and other plates) to produce prints in imitation of paintings (as distinct from wash drawings).

¹¹ There was an inherent limit to the amount of time Blake could spend on preparing the plates for color printing.  Unlike ink, water-soluble colors, even those mixed with a retardant, would have dried on the plate had Blake dawdled.  What Blake said in his “Public Address” about drawing, that it required a “firm and decided hand” working “at once” (E 576), was true not only of drawing the plate image but of printing in multiple colors.  The hand “which Doubts & Hesitates in the Midst of its Course” (E 575) will fail to produce the best possible image.

¹² According to J. T. Smith, writing in 1828,  “Blake’s coloured plates have more effect than others where gum has been used,” because they “are coloured . . . with a degree of splendour and force, as almost to resemble sketches in oil-colours” (Bentley, Records,  473, 472).  Smith based his assertions on works like “Albion rose,” which was one of “those beautiful specimens [the Small and Large Book of Designs] . . . coloured purposely for . . . Ozias Humphry” (Bentley, Records, 473).  Smith’s opinion that the opaque colors characteristic of Blake’s color printing are more “beautiful” than the transparent tints characteristic of water color drawings (which he equated with their binder, gum arabic) reflects the then fashionable taste for water colors in “imitation of the effect of oil painting . . . the explicit desirability” of which was “the bellwether of a new consciousness of the changing potential of water color art” (Cohn 11).

¹³ J. F. Gautier D’Agoty’s  Myologie has plates measuring 30 x 40 cm. to 66 x 46 cm.  Every impression in the two copies we examined revealed signs of registration at the corners.  The same is true of the eight plates in his Anatomie, measuring from 32 x 40 cm. to 40 x 54 cm., and 53 of the 63 plates color printed in his Observations, averaging 20.5 x 14.6 cm.; it is also true of the 15 plates in Cours complet d’anatomie, by A. E. Gautier D’Agoty, measuring 40 x 55 cm., which, according to Burch, are examples of color printing at its best (63).  We found the same to be true of every color-printed impression we examined in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery (San Marino, California), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven, Connecticut), and the Ackland Museum  (Chapel Hill, North Carolina).  These collections include works by Le Blon, Louis Bonnet, J. B. Jackson, Nicolas Le Sueur, Arthur Pond, Elisha Kirkall, Charles Knapton, Gilles Demarteau, Hubert Goltzius, Ugo Da Carpi, J. B. M. Papillon, Jean Francoise Janinet, and Philibert Louis De Bucourt.  Even the color prints by Pablo Picasso on display at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) showed signs of the second pull.  Misregistration and multiple platemarks in color prints are visible in good reproductions in books (see color plates I, II, IV in Friedman and color illustrations 46, 48, 52, and 57 in Lilien). Most reproductions, however, including those in Phillips’ book, are trimmed to the image, thereby hiding the evidence of multiple printing.

¹⁴ While it is possible to print an impression by rubbing the back of a sheet of paper lying on an inked relief-etched plate (though not for those sheets printed on both sides), to print from both levels and create the kinds of even embossments we see in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copy F requires a rolling press.  One of the labels in the Tate Britain exhibition, item 117c, suggested that Blake may have printed his plates with his hand.  Phillips claims that, in two-pull color printing, Blake may not have passed “the plate and impression through the rollers a second time,” but printed by “carefully applying pressure with the tips of his finger” (Phillips 102) or “by using the palm of his hand” (Phillips in Hamlyn and Phillips 106).  Ruthven Todd also argued that Blake’s color prints did not require a press, believing, incorrectly, that the colors would have been badly smeared had they gone under the rollers (37).  Colors applied to surface areas often did smear beyond the platemark, as in the frontispiece to Visions of the Daughters of Albion copy F.

¹⁵ By “accidentals” we mean the accidental inking or coloring of etched valleys, smudges of ink or color printed along the relief escarpments or the edges of the copperplates, diminishing amounts of ink or color on letters and pictorial motifs, and other mere accidents of inking (sometimes called “foul inking”) and color printing that do not intentionally contribute to the printed image.  The vast majority of Blake’s relief etchings contain at least minute examples of such flaws.  For examples from The Song of Los and how they indicate sequential printing without wiping, see Dörrbecker 320-21; Essick, Printmaker 128-29; and Viscomi, Idea 287.  For sequential printing without wiping in Blake’s color-printed separate plates, see Essick, Separate Plates 25,  32, 44.  For the sequential printing of the large color prints, first designed and executed in 1795, see Butlin, “Physicality.”

¹⁶ In the Blake exhibition at Tate Britain, item 118a was “Nurses Song” from Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy E; item 118b was “Nurses Song” from Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy C.  The latter shows no signs of misregistration and was presented as proof of the perfect registration supposedly exemplified by all the other color prints in the exhibition.

¹⁷ Phillips 99, quoting Geoffrey Morrow of the National Gallery of Canada.

¹⁸ Phillips interprets the small holes he claims exist in the four Ottawa impressions not only as registration pinholes but also as evidence that Blake began his color printing experiments with these four plates (98). The evidence for the Experience plates in Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies F, G, H, and T¹ having been printed together and before copies B-E is presented in Viscomi, Idea 267-73. Viscomi also suggests that these four copies are not incomplete, despite having only 15-17 plates, but were printed as works in progress. They may have been Blake’s first color-printed illuminated books. Phillips believes the supposed pinholes that he identifies as registration guides mark exactly where Blake began developing the technique (98).  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copies E and F, however, which are as accomplished as the Experience color prints, were color printed in the same style and on the same Edmeads & Pine paper used in early copies of Songs of Innocence, and they could have preceded Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies F-H and T¹, which were printed on paper without watermarks, as could have copies A-D, G, and M of There is No Natural Religion, which were rudimentarily color printed, also on paper without watermarks. With Songs of Experience, Blake seems to have seized the moment for all of its graphic possibilities: to practice color printing, to proof new plates, and to gather from the resulting impressions a few sets of prints.  Had developing the technique been Blake’s sole intention at the time, then he would probably not have used seventeen plates, let alone systematically printed four impressions per plate, nor would he have formed copies out of the resulting impressions.  Given the evidence now at hand, we do not know for sure which plates Blake color printed first, or even if the first experiments in color printing are extant. Phillips also discusses (106) Blake's use of lead white in early color-printed copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience and implies that the lead white was printed from the plates. The lead white we have found in copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience was applied by hand to the individual impressions. 

¹⁹ Phillips also speculates that pinholes may have been present in other impressions but repaired (101).  In all the eighteenth-century color prints using pinhole registration that we have seen, the holes, even when repaired, are not difficult to see as slight, rounded marks in the paper.  Many of the original color prints, particularly the later French chalk engravings meant to imitate pastel drawings, were trimmed to within the platemark and pinholes, thereby eliminating evidence of printing and enabling the print to pass as a drawing.

²⁰ Faithorne mentions a bottom sheet “to compass and make the Margin of the Plate” (58), but says nothing further about registration.  Anon., Sculptura, offers nothing on printing.  Dossie describes a bottom sheet, “the size of those that are to be printed,” used to “mark out the place where the plate should lie, that he [the printer] may the more readily put it, each time an impression is to be taken from it, in its proper situation” (2:193-94).

²¹ Letter to Bernard Quaritch, 31 March 1922 (quoted in Viscomi, Idea 102).  Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy E has many poorly registered images.  The “Introduction” in Experience has a 3.0 cm. top margin but only a 2.3 cm. bottom margin, making the image appear to be falling down the sheet; “Laughing Song” has a top margin that is 3 mm. wider than the bottom and the image slants to the right.  “Nurses Song” has a top margin 4 mm. wider than the bottom. Though less pronounced, the same “skillful carelessness” is apparent in Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies B, C, and D.  From the perspective of a book designer, these early copies with color-printed impressions are not visually coherent: an Innocence poem is in Experience, the ink color differs in the two sections, Experience has plates in different lettering styles and ink colors (e.g., plates 34-36).  This kind of disregard for precision and uniformity appears throughout Blake’s graphic works.  For example, even the relettering in pen and ink on the additional impression of plate 2 in The Book of Urizen copy C is not registered to the printed words.  The engraved lettering in Chaucers Canterbury Pilgrims, the Job engravings, and the “Laocoön” separate plate also shows a lack of precision in the placement of the letters relative to each other and relative to the preliminary lettering scratched into the plates.

²² Considerably more than 50% of the plates in the Huntington Library collection are crooked in relation to the edges of the sheets, or are printed far too low on the sheets. These include Songs of Innocence copy I (printed 1789), The Book of Thel  copy L (1790), Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies E (1789, 1794) and N (1795), The Song of Los copy E (1795), and Milton copy B (1811).  Works in the Pierpont Morgan Library collection follow suit: in Europe copy G (1794), 9 of 17 plates fall too low on the sheet (on average by 1.5 cm.); in Marriage copy F (1794), 11 of 27 plates are misaligned; and in Songs of Innocence copy D, 10 of 31 impressions are poorly aligned, either falling too low on the sheet, off center, slanted, or all three. In Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy V (c. 1818), also in the Morgan Library collection, almost 50% of the plates are misaligned.  We see similar high numbers in the copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience in the Yale Center for British Art collection, such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies F and L (1789/1794, 1795), and Songs of Innocence copy G of 1789 (illus. 51). An examination of the books, early and late, in other collections would no doubt yield similar results.

²³ Le Blon did not use a bottom sheet to print, though The New Encyclopedia Britannica article on “printing” mentions “a hand drawn grid” (vol. 14, column 1051).  Lilien, however, states that “this can only be described as a misleading and regrettable term to describe the roughening of the copper surface required for starting work on a mezzotint plate” (83).

²⁴ Similarly, the notion that Blake transferred his designs and texts from paper to copperplate, to avoid having to draw and rewrite his text backwards directly on the plate, creates a clumsy and unnecessary inefficiency for someone like Blake, skilled at designing and writing backwards.  See Essick, Printmaker 89-92, and Viscomi, Idea 16-25, 28-29, 370.

²⁵ For more detailed information on bottom sheets in printing and why we can be sure they were not used by the Blakes, see Viscomi, Idea 105-07, 394nn5, 6, 8.

²⁶ We are grateful to Keith Parker, assistant curator at The National Museum of Science & Industry, London, where the press is located, for measuring the circumference of the top roller.

²⁷ With hand-made yellow ochre ink, we were able routinely to produce three impressions from the plate in one inking, with exactly the kind of decreased saturation that characterizes Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy E (see illus. 71-73).

²⁸ John Updike noted in his review of the Metropolitan Museum Blake exhibition that Blake “laboriously [wrote] his self-published poems in minute backward lettering” (9).

²⁹ Phillips writes of the “failure to appreciate Blake’s achievement, and the time and skill that it required to accomplish…” (95).

³⁰ See Le Blon’s statement, quoted earlier, about his “reducing the Harmony of colouring in painting to Mechanical Practice, and under infallible Rules” (iv).

³¹ Reconstructing an illustrated text by dividing it into text and illustration and invisibly reconstituting these parts is not characteristic of Blake, an artist/poet for whom words and images are elements in a unified visual composition. Moreover, Blake appears often to go out of his way not to conceal his hand in the creative process. Rather than dividing the image into sketch and finished work in his water color drawings, Blake conflated the two stages, as his unerased and often vigorous pentimenti reveal (e.g., the illustrations to Thomas Gray and Dante). 

³² It is of course possible for practice and theory to run at cross-purposes; see for example Essick, “Production,” for contradictions between the painterly tendencies in Blake’s nineteenth-century prints and his linear aesthetic. In the present instance, however, we believe that practice gave rise to theory, and that this genetic relationship accounts for the consistencies between Blake’s graphic techniques and his comments on memory, measurement, repetition, and imagination quoted here.