1:  INTRODUCTION

ver the last thirty years, William Blake’s methods of etching the copperplates of his illuminated books have received more scrutiny than the ways he printed those plates. In 2000, however, printing techniques rose to the forefront of attention among the small band of scholars interested in how Blake made his books as the material foundation for interpretations of what they mean. Credit is due to Michael Phillips, for many years a well regarded bibliographic and historical scholar of Blake’s life and works, for raising the issue of Blake’s color printing methods and thereby stimulating the debate we wish to initiate in this essay. Phillips proposes that Blake created color-printed impressions of his relief etchings by passing them through his rolling press twice, once to print the text in ink and a second time to color print the design on the same sheet of paper. This “two-pull” procedure (as we will call it throughout this essay) differs fundamentally from a “one-pull” procedure, in which the inked text and the colored image are printed simultaneously in one pass through the rolling press.

The first, prominent appearance of his theory, one that attracted wide attention, was in the catalogue (Hamlyn and Phillips 106-07, 118) and wall labels for the great Tate Britain Blake exhibition, London, fall and winter 2000-01. A few of the labels in the smaller version of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, spring 2001, also at least hinted at the two-pull theory. In the exhibition catalogue sold at both venues, the two-pull theory is described in a straightforward manner that implies it is a generally accepted fact. By far the fullest explanation for the two pull procedure is presented in chapter 5 of Phillips' book, William Blake: The Creation of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience from Manuscript to Illuminated Printing (95-108).

The museums and publishers presenting the two-pull theory cannot fail to attract considerable respect. It is difficult to imagine more prestigious art-historical institutions than the Tate and the Met. The British Library and Princeton University Press lend similar authority to Phillips’ book. We assume that both publishers solicited the advice, and received the approval, of leading authorities in Blake and the graphic arts. The positive reception of Phillips’ book is indicated by Vincent Carretta’s and K. E. Smith's glowing reviews in Eighteenth-Century Studies and The Blake Journal respectively. But before the two-pull theory achieves complete acceptance within the community of Blake scholars, we wish to raise some serious reservations concerning its accuracy. We do so within the context of a thorough examination of Blake’s color prints, their minute visual features and the processes that created them, as well as their relationship to the color-printing technologies of the eighteenth century. We will also explain (and question) how the two-pull hypothesis implies a “Blake” very different from the artist, poet, and aesthetic theorist Blake himself portrays explicitly in his writings on the arts and implicitly throughout his graphic productions. Although we disagree strongly with Phillips’ theory, we are grateful to him for bringing to our attention the technical issues and their larger conceptual implications we consider in what follows. As Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Opposition is true Friendship” (E 42).