Table of Contents:
Introductory Essay
Division I: William Blake
Division II: Blake’s Circle
Boydell, John
Cumberland, George
Flaxman, John
Fuseli, Henry
Hayley, William
Linnell, John
Mathew, Anthony Stephen
Palmer, Samuel
Smith, John Thomas
Stothard, Thomas
Tulk, Charles Augustus
Blake Publications and Discoveries in 2013
The checklist of Blake publications recorded in 2013 includes works in French, German, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian, and there are doctoral dissertations from Birmingham, Cambridge, City University of New York, Florida State, Hiroshima, Maryland, Northwestern, Oxford, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Voronezh State, and Wrocław. The Folio Society facsimile of Blake’s designs for Gray’s Poems and the detailed records of “Sale Catalogues of Blake’s Works 1791-2013” are likely to prove to be among the most lastingly valuable of the works listed.
Gallica
A wonderful resource new to me is Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which reproduces over 2,000,000 searchable documents. For works in French it is invaluable.
Free Library of Philadelphia and Rosenbach Museum
According to an online press release of 17 April 2013, the “Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation and the Rosenbach Museum & Library announce intent to join forces to create nation’s preeminent rare book collection,” “the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation.” The Rosenbach Library has Descriptive Catalogue (M), For the Sexes (E), Poetical Sketches (R), and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (H), plus loose Blake prints, while the Free Library of Philadelphia has numerous books with Blake’s commercial engravings.
Curiosa
The online Gravestone Photographic Resource includes the gravestone in Bunhill Fields of William and Catherine Blake.
Blake’s Writings
Newly Recorded Works
Songs (CC, q) are identified here for the first time.
Blake Fingerprints
There are many fingerprints on top of the writing in the edition of Thomas Gray’s Poems (1790) that was inset into Blake’s watercolor illustrations for Gray (see Inscriptions on Designs in Part I). Some are admirably clear (see illus. 1).
The date at which the fingerprints appeared must be after c. 1797, when Blake made his watercolors for Gray. Of course we cannot be certain that the prints that appear near “William Blake” in his poem “To Mrs. Ann Flaxman” are those of the poet-artist. They could, for example, be those of Catherine Blake, who, it is believed, often helped her husband with simple tasks such as gluing the printed leaves of Gray into the windows cut in the paper used for the watercolors.The leaves for Blake’s watercolors (1795-96) illustrating Young’s Night Thoughts were made in a way very similar to that used in the illustrations for Gray’s Poems. The printed leaf was cut from the host volume (often eliminating or curtailing catchwords and ms. line numbers) and glued to a window cut in the leaf for the watercolor, and a red line was meticulously drawn round the cut-out leaf, with several red lines on title pages. However, the Night Thoughts leaves bear no fingerprints. Apparently the large leaves already had printed text mounted in them when they were given to Blake. Whether the fingerprints are those of Blake or his wife, they give an extraordinary sense of immediacy in the creative process.
Commercial Engravings
Job proofs are newly identified here. An exciting “new” Blake was the copy of Blair’s Grave (1813), with coloring attributed to William Blake by Martin Butlin, that appeared in the Vershbow sale of 29 October 2013. The copy had been previously described but not reproduced.
One of the most curious Blake productions of this or any other year is the copy of Blair’s Grave (1813) that was extra-illustrated by Blake’s acquaintance William Thane with a pastiche of images from Young’s Night Thoughts (see illus. 2-4).
A proof of Blake’s unpublished self-portrait of George Romney for Hayley’s Romney (1809) was acquired by Robert N. Essick. Only one copy has been recorded, and then lost,Philadelphia Blake exhibition (1939), lot 104. The print was loaned by Rosenwald but has not been traced among the Blakes he gave to the Library of Congress and the US National Gallery. since Blake described it in his letters of 1803 and 1804.
A new owner is recorded for a colored copy (V) of Young’s Night Thoughts (1797).
Criticism, Biography, and Scholarship
One of the most curious discoveries here is Miss Louisa Lane’s poem about “The Last Scene in Blake’s Life,” published in the Guernsey and Jersey Magazine (1838). This is the only known connection of Blake with the Channel Islands and the only known drama-fragment about Blake.
Blake’s Circle
Important new details are provided for George Cumberland, including the first publication of his farce The Emigrants, ed. Elizabeth B. Bentley (2013), John Linnell, including writings and drawings, A. S. Mathew (his will), and Charles Augustus Tulk (his album, with drawings by Blake and Flaxman).
* * * * * * * * *
The annual checklist of scholarship and discoveries concerning William Blake and his circle records publications and discoveries for the current year (say, 2013) and those for previous years that are not recorded in Blake Books, Blake Books Supplement, and “William Blake and His Circle.” Installments of “William Blake and His Circle” are continuations of Blake Books and Blake Books Supplement, with similar principles and conventions.
I have made no systematic attempt to record audio books and magazines, blogs, broadcasts on radio and television, calendars, CD-ROMs, chinaware, coffee mugs, comic books, computer printouts (unpublished), conferences, DVDs, electronic editions of works by Blake, e-mails, festivals and lecture series, flash cards, furniture, interactive multimedia, jewelry, lectures on audiocassettes, lipstick, manuscripts about Blake, microforms, mosaics, movies,See Aethelred the Unready, a short documentary (2012) on Aethelred Eldridge in honor of his receiving emeritus status from Ohio University. murals, music, notebooks (blank), novels merely tangentially about Blake, pageants, performances, pillows, places named after Blake, playing cards, plays, podcasts, poems about Blake, portraits, postcards, posters and individual pictures, recorded readings and singings, refrigerator magnets, stained-glass windows, stamps (postage and rubber), stickers, sweatshirts, tapestries,See Anon., “Theatre: Blake Remembered at West Dean [College],” in Part VI. T-shirts, tattoos (temporary and permanent), tiles, typescripts (unpublished), video recordings, and web sites.
I take Blake Books and Blake Books Supplement, faute de mieux, to be the standard bibliographical books on Blake,Except for the states of the prints for Blake’s commercial book engravings, where the standard authority is Robert N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Significant further details, especially about collations, are given in Roger R. Easson and Essick, William Blake Book Illustrator: A Bibliography and Catalogue of the Commercial Engravings, vol. 1: Plates Designed and Engraved by Blake (Normal: American Blake Foundation, 1972); vol. 2: Plates Designed or Engraved by Blake 1774-1796 (Memphis: American Blake Foundation, 1979); vol. 3 never appeared.
The standard authority for Blake prints issued separately is Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). and have noted significant differences from them.
The organization of Division I of the checklist is as in Blake Books. In Part VI: Criticism, Biography, and Scholarly Studies, collections of essays on Blake are listed under the names of the editors, and issues of periodicals devoted extensively to him are listed under the titles. Reviews, listed here under the book reviewed, are only for works which are chiefly about Blake, not for those with only, say, a chapter on Blake. Note that Blake Books and Blake Books Supplement normally do not include reviews.
Division II: Blake’s Circle is organized by individual (say, William Hayley or John Flaxman), with works by and about Blake’s friends and patrons, living individuals with whom he had significant direct and demonstrable contact. It does not include important contemporaries with whom Blake’s contact was negligible or nonexistent, such as John Constable and William Wordsworth and Edmund Burke. There is nothing in Blake Books and Blake Books Supplement corresponding to Division II.
Research for this checklist was carried out particularly in the libraries of the University of Toronto and Victoria University in the University of Toronto, as well as with the electronic resources of Copac, Google, Google Books, Google Scholar, and WorldCat. Works published in Japan were found in CiNii (National Institute of Informatics Scholarly and Academic Information Navigator), the National Diet Library online catalogue, Komaba Library and the General Library of the University of Tokyo, and the National Diet Library.
I should be most grateful to anyone who can help me to better information about the unseen (§) items reported here, and I undertake to thank them prettily in person and in print.
I am deeply grateful to Sarah Bentley (for transliterations from Russian), Fernando Castanedo (for works in Spanish), Robert N. Essick (especially for records of Quaritch catalogues and an early sight of his “Blake in the Marketplace, 2013”), Alexander Gourlay, Heather Jackson, Mary Lynn Johnson, Sarah Jones, Jeff Mertz (for reproductions of scores of works on Blake), Rachel Kahan Noyce, Hikari Sato (for publications in Japanese), and V. V. Serdechnaya (for works in Russian).
Symbols
* |
Works prefixed by an asterisk include one or more illustrations by Blake or depicting him. If there are more than 19, the number is specified. If the illustrations include all those for a work by Blake, say Thel or his illustrations to L’ Allegro, the work is identified. |
§ |
Works preceded by a section mark are reported on second-hand authority. |
Abbreviations
BB |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books (1977) |
BBS |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books Supplement (1995) |
Blake |
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly |
BR(2) |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records, 2nd ed. (2004) |
Butlin |
Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (1981) |
ISBN |
International Standard Book Number |
Division I: William Blake
Part I: Blake’s Writings
Section A: Original Editions, Facsimiles, Reprints, and Translations
Editors’ note:
Please consult Bentley, “Sale Catalogues of William Blake’s Works,” for further particulars of catalogues mentioned in this section.
Table of Watermarks
Addenda
W ELGAR 1796
Enoch designs ([1824-27])
<Butlin #827 1-2>Not recorded in Butlin’s table of watermarks (1: 627).
HAYES | 17
Little Tom the Sailor
1797
Little Tom the Sailor
fleur-de-lisAn Island in the Moon (?1784) has a watermark of a fleur-de-lis above a shield. (with horizontal chain lines 2.9 cm. apart)
Joseph Ordering Simeon to Be Bound (?1785) <Butlin #158>
Copperplate-Makers’ MarksCopperplate-makers’ marks were previously recorded in BB 86n4, 145, 235-36, 381n4, 518-19, 532, 545, and BBS 195n10.
Addendum
WILLm & BUSS
PONTIFEX & COMPny
Nos. 46, 47 & 48
SHOE LANE, LONDON
“Christ Trampling on Satan” (Blake–Butts) (copperplate verso)
America (1793)
Table
Copy |
Plates |
Leaves |
Watermark |
Blake nos. |
Leaf size in cm. |
Printing color |
#Fogg |
1 |
1 |
?? |
__ |
16.8 x 23.3 [a] |
dark blue [b] |
Copy A
Binding/History: It was “in portfolio” when offered by Quaritch (June 1904), lot 1602, for £260.
Editions
*
America [B].
William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2013.
*America [I]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2013.
The Book of Thel (1789)
Copy A
History: Offered with
The First Book of Urizen (F) and
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (A) in Quaritch
Rough List, No. 73 (Nov. 1885), lot 51, for £150.
Copy E
History: Offered in Quaritch catalogue No. 190 (July 1899), “7 engraved pages … coloured by Blake, uncut, in paper cover, preserved in a morocco case, by Rivière,” “it was Stothard’s,” £25.
Copy J
History: Quaritch offered it for £85 in his catalogue No. 62 (June 1893), Miscellaneous Catalogue (Nov. 1893), and catalogue No. 178 (March 1898).
Copy K
History: Quaritch offered it for £700 in his catalogues No. 665 (1949) and No. 672 (1949).
Copy R
Binding/History: It was still “in the original paper wrapper, uncut” when offered in Quaritch catalogue No. 203 (Dec. 1900), lot 194, for £63.
Editions
*
The Book of Thel [B].
William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2013.
*The Book of Thel [I]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2013.
Descriptive Catalogue (1809)
Copy F
History: Quaritch offered it in his catalogues
No. 178 (March 1898) and
No. 190 (July 1899), “
green morocco extra, from the Beckford Library,” for £10.10.0, and in
Catalogue 197 (1 March 1900), lot 3659, for £10.
Europe (1794)
Plates 6-7 <
BB p. 162>
In the pull of pl. 6 in Tate Britain, the leaf is cut off in mid-angel, and the vivid coloring is not Blake’s.
Edition
*
Europe [A].
William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2013.
The First Book of Urizen (1794)
Copy F
History: See
The Book of Thel (A), above.
Plates 5, 10 <BB p. 183>
History: Offered in James Tregaskis and Son, Caxton Head Catalogue 830 (Sept. 1920), lots 41 (£65) and 42 (£70).
For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (?1826)
Plate 14 <
BB p. 204>
History: Sold at Sotheby’s, 19 Jan. 1885, lot 575 (
The Ghost of Abel erroneously described as a “Facsimile”) for £1.16.0 to J. Pearson, who offered them in his catalogue 58 at £12.12.0.
Inscriptions on Designs
Designs (1797) for Gray, Poems (1790) <BB p. 216>
Fingerprints:The only previous reference to Blake fingerprints I have found is in BB p. 217, which locates them on the Gray title page, pp. 58, 158, “and occasionally elsewhere.” There are brownish-rust fingerprints, perhaps made from animal glue, on the text (never on the watercolors):
The
title page, above, below, and to the right of “A NEW EDITION”
Gray
p. 58: “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” after “ſee, how all around ’em wait”
Gray
p. [62]: Captions for “A Long Story,” beneath “riding on Flies”
Gray
p. [76]: Captions for “Ode to Adversity,” above “thy suppliants”
Gray
p. [107]: Title page for “The Fatal Sisters,” over “
Orcades”
Gray p. [158]: Poem “To M
rs. Ann Flaxman,” above and below “William Blake,” four fingers of the right(?) hand, the clearest of them all (see
illus. 1).
1. Four clear fingerprints are visible on Blake’s poem to Ann Flaxman on text p. [158] of Gray’s
Poems (1790) with watercolors by Blake (see
enlargement of text area). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. B1992.8.11(58).
The color apparently consists of glue made from animal matter. The prints are on top of the writing and were almost certainly added when the leaves for the printed text were glued into windows cut in the far larger leaves that carry Blake’s watercolor illustrations. This means that they were probably made by William or Catherine Blake.
More fingerprints are faintly visible on other Gray pages, but no Blake fingerprint from elsewhere has been identified.
In some, probably most, cases, Blake’s writing on blank text pages was added after the watercolor for that page was completed. On p. [54], the list of designs overflows the text box, and nos. 8-10 are on the leaf for the watercolor. In this case, at any rate, the watercolor preceded the list of designs.
On p. [158], Blake wrote the poem to Mrs. Flaxman on the blank verso of the printed text box, then glue fingerprints were left on top of the manuscript poem, probably in the process of gluing the printed leaves onto the windows of the large leaves for the watercolors. In this case, the manuscript probably preceded the watercolor.
“Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion” (1773, c. 1810-20)
See the entry in Part III.
Letters (1791-1827)
1800 1 April
History: Offered by
James TregaskisAccording to Keynes, Bibliography (1921), Keynes, ed., Letters (1956, 1968), it was “offered for sale in several catalogues of … James Tregaskis about 1910.” Keynes, Letters (1968), says it was sold at Sotheby’s, 5 July 1909, lot 106, for £3.18.0 to Quaritch; BB p. 275n4 comments: “the only Sotheby sale of this date which I can trace consists entirely of coins.” in
Caxton Head Catalogue 655 (14 Sept. 1908), lot 41,
Catalogue 720 (1912), lot 80,
Catalogue 733 (18 Nov. 1912), lot 65, and
Catalogue 800 (4 Feb. 1918), lot 55.
1800 22 September
History: Blake’s letters of 22 September, end of September, 2 October 1800, 10 May, 11 September 1801, 10 January, 22 November (both parts) 1802, 25 April, 6 July, 16 August 1803 were offered in Quaritch Catalogue 317 (1878).Not first sold “about 1906,” as in Keynes, ed., Letters (1968) <see BB p. 276>.
1815 29 July (Josiah Wedgwood to Blake)
Corrigenda
Stamped, like all the Wedgwood manuscripts here, with “THE PROPERTY OF | JOSIAH WEDGWOOD & SONS, LTD., | ETRURIA MUSEUM”. Annotated in modern ink at the top right corner with the Wedgwood Museum reference number: 4382-6. The text is as in Bentley, ed., William Blake’s Writings (1977) 1647, except that (1) there is no comma after “together”; (2) after “two or three drawings” for “[.]” read “&”; (3) for “vessel” read “veſsel”; (4) at the conclusion, for “I am Sir | Your mo obt Servt” read “I am Sir Your mo. obd Servt”.
1815 8 September (Blake to Josiah Wedgwood)
Corrigenda
Annotated in modern ink at the top right corner with the Wedgwood Museum reference number: 4383-6. Along the right margin is show-through, presumably a docket: “W Blake | 15 Sept 1815”. The text is as in Bentley, ed., William Blake’s Writings (1977) 1648, except that the lineation of the conclusion is different:
17 South Molton Street | William Blake |
8 Septembr 1815 | |
Edition
Letters [1825-27].
William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2013.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (?1790-93)
Copy A
History: See
The Book of Thel (A), above.
Copy E
History: Offered by Quaritch in catalogue No. 62 (June 1893) and Miscellaneous Catalogue (Nov. 1893), “n.d. (1800),” “4to. 27 unnumbered leaves … coloured by Blake, hf. bd. uncut” in each.
Plates 5-6
See “The Order in which the Songs of Innocence and Experience ought to be paged,” below.
Editions
§
El matrimonio del Cielo y del Infierno. Trans. Xavier Villaurrutia. With a prefatory note taken from G. K. Chesterton. 1942, 1998, 2003, 2004. In Spanish. <
BB #115,
Blake (2009)> E. Seville: Editorial Renacimiento, 2007, 2010. Colección “El Clavo Ardiendo,” 12
o, 64 pp.; “G. K. Chesterton,” with the correct initials, does not include “A Song of Liberty” or the “Chorus”; ISBN: 9788484723363.
Preface (1½ pp.) by “C. [sic] K. Chesterton.” [Fernando Castanedo has found the original text in English in Chesterton’s William Blake (?1910) 208-10.]
*El matrimonio del cielo y el infierno [H]. Ed. and trans. Fernando Castanedo. 2002. In Spanish, with facing English for Marriage. <Blake (2003)> B. 2007. C. 2010. D. 4th ed., revised. 2012.
Review
*J. L. C., “William Blake poeta, pintor, visionario y librepensador,”
La tribuna de Albacete [Albacete] 20 April 2008: 48 (also published in
Diario Palentino [Palencia] 24 April 2008: 42) (in Spanish).
*The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [B]. Ed. Michael Phillips. 2011. <Blake (2012)>
Review
J. B. Mertz (see
Blake 47.1 in Part VI).
§*Le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer. Trans. Patrick Bryand. Amazon Digital Services, Kindle Edition, 2013. In French and English.
Milton (1804[-11])
Copy B
History: Offered by Quaritch in catalogues
No. 61 (1891), £180,
Rough List 122 (end of March 1892), £180, and
No. 62 (June 1893), £160, described as “large 8vo. 45
leaves … coloured by the hand of William Blake; calf neat.”
“The Order in which the Songs of Innocence and Experience ought to be paged”
(?after 1818)
Description:
Marriage pls. 5-6I am grateful to Robert N. Essick for many of the new details about pls. 5-6. See “Blake in the Marketplace, 2013,” Blake 47.4 (spring 2014): illus. 1-2, where the prints are described minutely. on the recto and verso of a leaf 11.7 x 16.0 cm., printed probably about 1790 in reddish brown
(pl. 5)Not “sepia” as in BB p. 287. Marriage copy B pls. 1, 3, 6, 8-9, 12, 14-15, 18-19, 22-23, 26-27 were also printed (?in 1790) in reddish brown, as were pls. 1-9, 12, 14-15, 18-19, 22-23, 25-27 in copy H and all of copy G (watermarked 1815). and
red (pl. 6); Essick writes: “Neither [Joseph] Viscomi nor I have been able to find a close match for the red ink of this impression among Blake’s other printings of Marriage pls. datable to c. 1790.” pl. 5 has blue wash for sky behind the falling man and horse.
Watermark: Wove paper without watermark.
Binding: The leaf is mounted on an unwatermarked leaf (23.8 x 31.2 cm.), with a brown line boxing pl. 5. At the top right of the mount of pl. 5 is written “90” in pen and brown ink. The host-leaf and number were probably added “about 1853” (
BB p. 337) by George A. Smith. The mount was stabbed at least twice; it has eight stabholes and a set of eighteen smaller holes. In pencil below pl. 5 is “from Marriage of Heaven & Hell page 5” and on the verso in the same hand “Heaven & Hell page 6.” The leaf with pls. 5-6 was acquired in a frame with glass on both sides, but the glass was removed by Essick.
History: See
BB p. 340-41 and Essick, “
Blake in the Marketplace, 2013,”
Blake 47.4 (spring 2014): illus. 1.
Song of Los (1795)
Copy C
Binding/History: “
bound in contemporary half morocco” with
Europe (G) and
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (H), according to Quaritch catalogue
No. 203 (Dec. 1900), lot 193, £315.
Edition
“
The Song of Los: Pesn' Losa.” Trans. into Russian with commentary by V. V. Serdechnaya.
Volshebnaya gora [Moscow] no. 15 (2009): 461-68.
Reprinted in Russian in her Malye poemy Uil'yama Bleika: Povestvovanie, tipologiya, kontekst [Small Poems of William Blake: Narrative, Typology, Context] (see Serdechnaya in Part VI).
Songs of Innocence (1789)
Copy J
History: Offered in Quaritch
Catalogue 197 (1 March 1900), lot 3651, frontispiece, title page, plus ten leaves, for £20.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794[-1831])
Table
Copy |
Plates missing or added |
Leaves |
Watermark |
Blake nos. |
Leaf size in cm. |
Printing color |
CC
Untraced |
-1, 39 |
52 |
|
3-28, 30-53 |
unknown |
unknown |
q
Untraced |
-1, 2, 28-54 |
25 |
|
__ |
unknown [a] |
|
Order of the Plates in Songs of Experience
CC
The last plate is pl. 39; no other copy ends with pl. 39.
Variant Newly Recorded
Plate 1 (combined title page)
See copy p, below.
Copy I
Binding/History: Offered in Quaritch catalogue No. 217 (July 1902), lot 130, for £315: “coloured by the author, comprising 54 leaves printed on one side of the paper only; bd. … A flyleaf bears the signature of H. W. Phillips, the painter.”
Copy K
Binding/History: “inlaid on folio size cardboards, with guards, half morocco, g.e.” when sold in the Catalogue of the Library of the Late Alfred Aspland at Sotheby’s (19 Jan. 1885), lot 309, for £7.10.0 to Suarez.
Copy U
Binding/History: Offered in Quaritch catalogue No. 62 (June 1893) and Miscellaneous Catalogue (Nov. 1893) for £170: “coloured, and gilt by the Author, green morocco super extra, gilt edges, by C. Lewis, extremely rare, from the Beckford Library, Hamilton Palace … Pages 1-54, title included.”
Copy W
It is reproduced in the Russian facsimile (see Песни невинности и опыта: Songs of Innocence and of Experience [2010], below).
Newly Recorded Copy
Copy CC
Binding: Described in Quaritch
Rough List, No. 73 (Nov. 1885), lot 52, as bound in “12mo.
calf gilt”: “
Collation; Songs of Innocence, 1789: Plate 1 (frontispiece [pl. 2]), plate 2 (title [pl. 3]),
plates numberedThe fact that the plates are numbered indicates that this is not a posthumous copy. 3-28 (no 29) and plate 30—Songs of Experience, 1794, the plates numbered on 31-53.” “On comparing this copy with that from Hamilton Palace [U] (priced £170), it appears to want the general title [pl. 1] and the plate
‘The Sick Rose’ [pl. 39].“The Sick Rose,” which is missing, must have been numbered “54”. No extant copy of the Songs has pl. 39 as the last leaf. Plain copies are scarcer than those issued in a coloured state.”
History: Offered in Quaritch
Rough List, No. 73 (Nov. 1885), lot 52, for £31.10.0; untraced.
Copy p
For the binding and history, see 2013 9–10 April, lot 64, in Part IV. Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2013,” Blake 47.4 (spring 2014): illus. 3, notes that the title page (pl. 1) is in a previously unrecorded second state.
Newly Recorded Copy
Copy q
Binding: Described in Quaritch catalogues
No. 270 (March 1871), lot 35, as “high 4to. a Series of 20 Poems,
engraved on copper, and surrounded with eccentric designs, hf. bd. … s.a. (?1830),” and
No. 289 (April 1873), lot 14716, “high 4to.
a Series of 20
plates of very quaint execution, hf. bd. …
s.a. (? 1830).” It probably consisted of pls. 3-27 on 25 leaves.
History: Offered in Quaritch catalogue
No. 270 (March 1871), lot 35, £2.16.0, and
No. 289 (April 1873), lot 14716, £2.2.0; untraced.
Plate a
History: Offered in James Tregaskis, Caxton Head Catalogue 796 (15 Oct. 1917), lot 3 (£23), Catalogue 810 (20 Jan. 1919), lot 4 (£23), and James Tregaskis and Son, Caxton Head Catalogue 830 (Sept. 1920), lot 46 (£23).
Editions
*
Canciones de Inocencia y de Experiencia. Trans. José Luis Caramés and Santiago García Corugedo. 1987. <
BBS p. 137> In Spanish. B. 1995. C. 1999. D. 2003. E. 2006. F. 2009. G. 2012.
It consists of “Introducción” (7-51), divided into “William Blake (1757-1827)” (9-12), “Contexto” (12-20), “Ritual” (20-28), “Simbología” (28-37), “Cosmología y Canciones de Inocencia y de Experiencia” (37-44), “Nota a esta edición” (45-46), “Tabla de concordancias” (47), “Obras de William Blake” (48), “Bibliografía” (49-51). English and Spanish texts on facing pages (56-161). According to the editors, Blake identified the essence of poetry with the process of a ritual. Reproduces a few Blake designs and plates in black and white.
*Песни невинности и опыта: Songs of Innocence and of Experience [W]. 12.0 x 20.5 cm., 240 pp. Moscow: Rudominо, 2010. <§Blake (2012)>
Review
*Vera Serdechnaya (see
Blake 47.1 in Part VI).
*Facsimile of the Original Outlines before Colouring of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience [U]. 1893. <BB #173> B. §Facsimile of What Is Believed to Be the Last Replica of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. [Charleston, South Carolina]: Nabu Press, 2012. 146 pp.; ISBN: 9781279004845.
The 2012 edition is scanned from that of 1893.
There is No Natural Religion (?1788)
Copy E
History: Offered in James Tregaskis,
Caxton Head Catalogue 796 (15 Oct. 1917), lot 2, from the Stopford A. Brooke collection (£52).
Tiriel (?1789)
Manuscript
History: It was lent, apparently by Mrs. Gilchrist, to
Algernon Swinburne in 1864;According to Swinburne’s letter to W. M. Rossetti, 13 Oct. [1864], “The one autograph ms ever entrusted to me was Tiriel” (Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. Terry L. Meyers, vol. 1 [1848-1874] [London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005] 29).
Joseph Knight wrote to Swinburne on 9 Feb. 1865: “My friend Purnell can lend you the volume of Blake you require. … I will call on Sunday afternoon for the M.S.” (1: 31). It isn’t clear whether the “volume of Blake” is the same as the “M.S.” Swinburne’s friend Thomas Purnell (1834-89) is not recorded in BB, BBS, Blake, BR(2), or Butlin. … offered by Quaritch in catalogues
No. 243 (Oct. 1905), lot 180 (£125), and
No. 271 (Jan. 1909), lot 194 (£50), each described as “
About 1790,” “
neatly written in a small hand on 8
leaves; with the original blue paper wrapper,” “the inscription on … the original blue paper cover, ‘Tiriel, MS. by Mr. Blake’ is in Blake’s own handwriting,” “The handwriting is the same, though the pen with which the last part is written is somewhat finer.”
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)
Copy F
Binding/History: Described in Quaritch catalogue
No. 405 (Dec. 1926), lot 242 (£525), as “Folio, 11
ll., printed in brown on one side only and finely coloured by hand by Blake, with water-colour and opaque pigment, the frontispiece has been inlaid and a torn leaf has been skilfully repaired; loosely inserted in a volume; half morocco, uncut … duplicates of the first three plates, printed in green and painted in water-colours, are inserted.”
Copy I
Binding: Described in Quaritch catalogue No. 231 (June 1904), lot 1601, as “Folio, 11 leaves … coloured by the hand of the artist himself; half morocco, gilt edges, with the bookplate of Thomas Gaisford.”
Edition
*
Visions of the Daughters of Albion [H].
William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2013.
Section B: Collections and Selections
Blake Shishu [The Poems of Blake]. Trans. Bunsho Jugaku. 1950, 1968. <BB #235> C. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2013. 448 pp.; ISBN: 9784003221730. With plates reproduced by the hands of Jugaku. In Japanese.
§“Božeska podoba [Divine Image].” Ruske slovo [Novi Sad] 37 (2009): 12. In Ukrainian.
“The Edition of the Works of Wm. Blake” by “The Blake Press at Edmonton” (1884–90) <BB #249>
Volume I (b) The Book of Thel
James Tregaskis, Caxton Head Catalogue 676 (11 Oct. 1909), lot 93 (£15.15.0), offered Muir’s facsimile of The Book of Thel executed completely by hand, “red morocco, gilt border, gilt edges” [n.d.] [apparently not the Lister-Essick copy bound in olive brown morocco, edges not gilt].
§Europe | Lambeth 1794 | Printed by Blake.
An anonymous watercolor adaptation of Europe pl. 2 (title page) on laid paper showing a kneeling naked man(?) with a curling serpent (as in Europe pl. 2) growing from his head. Offered on eBay, December 2013.
§“He who bends to himself a joy.” Shanty Bay, Ontario: Shanty Bay Press, 2002-07. Broadside, limited to 50 copies.
§“Infant Joy.” Shanty Bay, Ontario: Shanty Bay Press, 2002-07. Broadside, limited to 50 copies.
*Libros proféticos I. Trans. Bernardo Santano. Vilaür [Gerona]: Atalanta, 2013. Colección Imaginatio vera 80. 4o, 704 pp.; ISBN: 9788494094156. In Spanish.
Contains Patrick Harpur, “Introducción a los Libros proféticos de William Blake” (9-22); Bernardo Santano, “Prefacio del traductor” (23-27); “Bibliografía de William Blake en español” (28-29); Tiriel (31-60); El libro de Thel (61-80); El matrimonio de cielo e infierno (81-123); La Revolución francesa (125-59); Visiones de las hijas de Albion (161-91); América: Profecía (193-235); Europa: Profecía (237-74); El [primer] libro de Urizen (277-342); El libro de Ahania (343-74); El libro de Los (375-94); El cantar de Los (395-414); Vala, o los cuatro Zoas (415-701); “Créditos” (702-03) (credits for works reproduced).
Illustrated hardcover volume (first of two) with twelve works by Blake; brief individual introductions by Bernardo Santano; Blake in English and Spanish on facing pages; includes significantly illustrated plates, leaving out those mainly with text (e.g., of Marriage [D] it reproduces 13/27 plates: 1-5, 10-11, 14-15, 16, 20-21, 24); announces forthcoming second volume with Milton, Jerusalem, and a glossary (for 2014). An imposing edition.
Reviews
*Jesús García Calero, “
William Blake, el hombre que vio el lado oscuro de la modernidad,”
ABC (
Cultura) [Madrid] 19 Nov. 2013 (in Spanish).
*Iván Pintor Iranzo, “El paraíso de William Blake, recobrado,”
La Vanguardia (
Cultura) [Barcelona] 4 Dec. 2013: 6-7 (with the Spanish edition of Kathleen Raine’s
Golgonooza) (in Spanish).
*Antonio Colinas, “
Blake. Libros proféticos I,”
El cultural (
El Mundo) [Madrid] 6 Dec. 2013: 12-13, and Fernando Aramburu, “
Blake el oscuro,” p. 13 (in Spanish).
*Fernando Castanedo, “Clamor en el desierto,”
El País (
Babelia) [Madrid] 7 Dec. 2013: 8 (in Spanish).
§William Blake: Selected Poetry and Letters. Ed. with an introduction by J. M. Beach. Austin: West by Southwest Press, 2012. 234 pp.; ISBN: 9781479155026.
Part II: Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings
Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors
Gray, Thomas, Poems (1797-98)
See Inscriptions on Designs under Part I, Section A.
Edition
*[Poems of Thomas Gray with Watercolour Illustrations by William Blake. London: Folio Society, 2013.]There is no separate Folio Society title page; the title here is from the cover, and the imprint is by inference. Folio (32.4 x 42.2 cm.), 210 pp., 117 illustrations, including Flaxman’s portrait of Blake; no ISBN. Limited to 1020 copies (1000 for sale).
Colophon: “reproduced from the originals held at the Yale Center for British Art … by Dot Gradations, Wickford, Essex, and printed by Appl, Wemding, Germany, on [thick, heavy, unwatermarked] Natural Evolution paper … bound by Zanardi, Padova, Italy, in Nigerian goatskin leather with cloth sides … the endleaves are of Curious Metallics gold leaf backed with Nettuno Carruba.” It is in a fitted box (36.6 x 46.4 x 8.3 cm.) with *Irene Tayler, Blake’s Illustrations to the Poems of Gray, ed. Martin Butlin (see Tayler in Part VI).
The facsimile is so faithful that it represents clearly the show-through of printed text. The folio flier has twenty illustrations.
Section B: Collections and Selections
Smaller Blake-Varley Sketchbook (1819)
A separate leafThere are slightly disfiguring oil stains in the paper, which could have come from a book or piece of wood resting on it. <Butlin #692 53-54 [Two Visionary Figures, Mountains Behind]> was sold at Christie’s, 15 June 1971, lot 157 [£157.15.0 to “Hearson” (i.e., Pearson) for Anchard Fine Arts Ltd]. It was sold again at Christie’s (New York), 31 January 2013, lot 147 (see 2013 31 January in Part IV).
The design represents an angel with arms and wings upraised standing before a man who is pointing to our right. Surrounding the head of the pointing man is a large circle, perhaps representing a halo or the sun, and in the background are three pyramid-shaped objects.
The verso is inscribed by Varley “it is allways [sic] to keep yourself collected”, and, according to Butlin #692 53, the recto is “inscr. by Varley … ’Hotspur …’, the rest illegible, apparently on four lines below drawing.”Butlin tells me in an e-mail of March 2013 that the Hotspur inscription was still legible when he saw it in 2012. Neither I nor several advisors using raking light and magnifying glasses of various powers could find where the writing is supposed to be, much less read it. It is difficult to relate the design or the words to Henry Percy (1364–1403), son of the Earl of Northumberland, who was killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury (see Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1). Blake made a separate visionary head of Hotspur <Butlin #745>, which is visually unrelated to this drawing. And in the same Blake-Varley sketchbook <Butlin #692 131> is a drawing unrelated to Hotspur inscribed “Hotspur said … we shou[l]d have had the Battle had it not been for those cursed Stars[.] Hotspur Said he was indignant to have been killed by … such a Person as Prince Henry who was so much his inferior” (BR[2] 368).
Part III: Commercial EngravingsFrom 2010 I record pre-1863 references to separately issued prints by Blake.
Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors
Editors’ note:
Please consult Bentley, “Sale Catalogues of William Blake’s Works,” for further particulars of catalogues mentioned in this section.
Bible
ספר איוב Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826, 1874)
Colored copy: In BB p. 523, after “American Art Association, 16 April 1923, lot 118,” add “[$3125 to James Williams].”
Newly Recorded
Thirteen “excessively rare” “Early Proof Impressions” of Job pls. numbered 1-3, 6-8, 11, 14, 16-17, 19-21 were offered in Quaritch Rough List 73 (November 1885), lot 55 (£10.0.0), and are now untraced.
Blair, Robert, The Grave (1808, 1813)
A copy of the 1808 quarto bound in “calf, extra, gilt edges [by Edwards of Halifax]” was offered in Dulaw and Company, Ltd., catalogue 182, Rare Books ([London]: 32 Old Bond Street, [?1931]), lot 182, £120, and has not since been traced.
A proof of pl. 4, “The Counsellor, King, Warrior, Mother & Child in the Tomb,” on a leaf without watermark 23.4 x 14.6 cm., 0.22 mm. thick, was acquired by Robert N. Essick in 2013. It lacks some hatching strokes but has “a small patch of hatching on the central extension of the counsellor’s beard” not present in later states; it was “probably burnished off the pl.”Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2013,” Blake 47.4 (spring 2014), gives a detailed description of the unique features of the proof.
William Thane’s Copy of The Grave
A copy (1813) in the Library of Congress PR3318.B7 A7 1813, Rosenwald Collection. To view the entire work, see <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/Rosenwald.1827.1>. Illus. 2-4 here are images 12, 13, and 132. is extra-illustrated with designs cut from Young, Night Thoughts (1797). The Night Thoughts prints are slightly larger than those in The Grave, and therefore the full-page designs were trimmed in both dimensions, including the imprint. Occasionally an attempt is made to repeat motifs in the illustrations to The Grave with facing prints from Night Thoughts (see illus. 2-3). Sometimes it is difficult to perceive a controlling motif (see illus. 4).
2. Blair’s
Grave (1813) extra-illustrated with prints from Young’s
Night Thoughts (1797) p. 19 (trumpeter plunging to skeleton), p. 46 (nude woman gesturing), and p. 43 (woman with stars in her hair). The page carefully echoes the engraved title page of Blair’s
Grave (1808), which faces it (
illus. 3). Library of Congress, Rosenwald Collection.
3. Blair’s Grave (1808) engraved title page from the extra-illustrated copy. The plunging trumpeter is more explicitly naked than the one in Night Thoughts. Library of Congress, Rosenwald Collection.
4. The Night Thoughts cuttings are from p. 87 (in center, Christ with children), p. 31 (at right, man in chair beneath floating woman), p. 4 (on left, man in woods), p. 49 (above him, head of curly-haired man), p. 15 (above him, floating figure reoriented from almost vertical to horizontal), and p. 75 (at top right, figure reoriented). It is difficult to find a common theme in these images. Library of Congress, Rosenwald Collection.
Binding: Originally in blue paper wrappers (only the back one survives); bound (post-1929) in modern red morocco with marbled endpapers at front and back.
History: Assembled by William Thane—the back blue paper cover is inscribed “This book was given to me by M
ṛ W
ṃ Thane the picture restorer with the additional slips pasted in—just as it is—M
ṛ Thane knew Blake—”; sold in
The Library of John Quinn, Anderson Galleries, 12-14 November 1923, lot 716 [for $95] to Rosenbach, who sold it on 3 May 1929 for $1200 to Lessing J. Rosenwald; given to the Library of Congress.
Kathryn Barush reports nine previously unrecorded loose copies of Blair prints in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,They are not listed in the catalogue of the Douce bequest to the Bodleian Library (1840).
Their discovery is reported by Kathryn Barush, “Visions of Mortality” (see Barush in Part VI), which reproduces nos. 1, 3, 5, 8-9 on a greatly reduced scale, but not the proof of no. 10 (“The Death of the Good Old Man”). Another proof of no. 10 is in the collection of Robert N. Essick.
The presence of pencil prices of “2/” on no. 1 and “3/6” on nos. 5, 8, and the facts that “the matting, quality and size of the prints vary, suggest … that they were assembled separately” (Barush 60). consisting of pls.
1. Title page, proof, with the Douce Collection stamp.“Douce Collection, Un[iversity] Ox[ford].”
3. “The Meeting of a Family in Heaven” with the Douce Collection stamp.
4. “The Counseller, King, Warrior, Mother & Child, in the Tomb.”
5. “Death of the Strong Wicked Man” with the Douce Collection stamp.
7. “The Descent of Man into the Vale of Death.”
8. “The Day of Judgment” with the Douce Collection stamp.
9. “The Soul Exploring the Recesses of the Grave.”
10. “The Death of the Good Old Man,” “an untitled proof copy, before the final lettering.”
11. “Death’s Door.”
The print of the title page displays, at the bottom-right corner, the etched legend “Proof Copy R.H.C. Price 5.5.0” (as in the large paper copies of 1813 in Harvard and Princeton [see BB p. 533]).The 1813 copies with “Proof Copy …” are remainders from the 1808 printing.
“Death’s Door” Reproductions (Nineteenth Century)Omitting the prints, reduced to about a quarter of the original size, signed by A. L. Dick and reproduced in New York editions of 1847, 1858, and ?1879. I am deeply grateful to Robert N. Essick for suggestions and facts.
1805
Blake’s experimental white-line etching (plate size 11.7 x 18.6 cm.), never published, one copy known; the old man moves to the right and the young man looks up to the left.
1808
Louis Schiavonetti’s conventional engraving (plate size 17.5 x 29.7 cm.) for Blair’s Grave; the directions are reversed (see illus. 5). For the 1806 proof, see Blair in “William Blake and His Circle, 2012,” Blake 47.1 (summer 2013).
5. “Death’s Door” (plate size 17.5 x 29.7 cm.), engraved after Blake by L. Schiavonetti for Blair’s
Grave (1808). Collection of Robert N. Essick. Image courtesy of the
William Blake Archive <
http://www.blakearchive.org>.
1852
W. J. Linton, wood engraving of “Death’s Door,” The Ladies’ Drawing Room Book (New York, [1852]) and Anon., “Death and Immortality,” Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Art 1 (12 June 1852): 369-71, signed on the threshold with a WJL monogram, design size of each 13.7 x 21.9 cm., with rounded upper corners; the old man moves to the right.
1853
The same wood engraving appears in Anon., “Mourir, c’est renaître,” Le magasin pittoresque [Paris] (Feb. 1853): 41 (illustration), 42 (text).
1860
W. J. Linton, Thirty Pictures by Deceased British Artists (1860) (design size 12.05 x 20.8 cm.), reprinted in John Jackson, A Treatise on Wood Engraving, 2nd ed. (1861) and in the new ed. [?1881]. The old man faces left. This version is different from that printed in 1852.
1863
A wood engraving (design size 11.3 x 17.4 cm.) signed “L. Chapon” (Léon Louis Chapon [1836-1918]), printed in M. W. Bürger, [i.e., J. Thoré], Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles: école anglaise (Paris, 1863). It is reprinted on the front page of Allgemeine Familien Zeitung no. 36 (1873), signed “F. Bocourt” (probably Marie Firmin Bocourt) and “L. Chapon.”Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2013,” Blake 47.4 (spring 2014).
Bürger, Gottfried Augustus, Leonora a Tale, trans. J. T. Stanley (1796)
The tailpiece of a soldier running to a woman on a couch is signed “Blake. in[v].” and “Perry. sc”. However, Blake’s watercolor for the tailpiece is inscribed lightly in pencil “Blake del & sc.”,Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2013,” Blake 47.4 (spring 2014): illus. 12. indicating that he expected to engrave it.
“Christ Trampling on Satan” (Blake–Thomas Butts)
The copperplate was given in 2002 by Gertrude W. DennisThe book- and print-shop of Mrs. Dennis’s father, E. Weyhe, regularly had copies of the print for sale and repeatedly denied to GEB that they knew where the copperplate was or whether it survived. to the Morgan Library (B3 C 114 04L).
Size: 16.6 x 31.2 cm.
Copperplate-maker’s mark on the verso: WILL
m & BUSS | PONTIFEX & COMP
ny | Nos. 46, 47 & 48 | SHOE LANE, LONDON
Cumberland (George) Card
Copies were offered in James Tregaskis, Caxton Head Catalogue 810 (20 Jan. 1919), lot 3 (£14), Catalogue 815 (23 June 1919), lot 5 (£14), James Tregaskis and Son, Caxton Head Catalogue 830 (Sept. 1920), lot 45 (£14), and Tregaskis Bulletin 8 (Feb. 1934), lot 22 (£3).
An impression (collection of Robert N. Essick) was reproduced by the William Blake Archive in 2013.
“Edmund Pitts” (after Earle)
Copies were offered in James Tregaskis, Caxton Head Catalogue 673 (19 July 1909), lot 62 (£1.5.0) and Catalogue 689 (18 July 1910), lot 251 (£1.5.0).
On the acquisition of the Morgan impression (s E. 18.4) [Essick 2G], acquired with an album of Blakeiana (B3 031 A02) including drawings on tracing paper “possibly attributable to Linnell after designs by Blake,” see §Nineteenth Report to the Fellows of the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1978-1980, ed. Charles Ryskamp (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1981) 178.
Enfield, William, The Speaker (1774 [i.e., 1780], 1781, 1785, 1795, 1797, 1799, 1800)
At the end of a 1795 copy in Victoria University in the University of Toronto is an eight-page catalogue of Joseph Johnson publications, including Bonnycastle, Mensuration (“Price 3s. bound”), Salzmann, Elements of Morality with fifty plates (“Price 10s.6d. bound”), and Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life (“Price 2s.6d. with Cuts bound, or 2s. without Cuts”).
Flaxman, John, A Letter to the Committee for Raising the Naval Pillar (1799)
Edition
A Letter to the Committee for Raising the Naval Pillar. Gale ECCO Print Editions, 2010. ISBN: 9781140710479. A digitized version of the British Library copy.
Hayley, William, An Essay on Sculpture (1800)
Blake’s plates (collection of Robert N. Essick) were reproduced by the William Blake Archive in 2013.
Hayley, William, The Life, and Posthumous Writings, of William Cowper, Esqr. (1803-04)
Blake’s plates (collection of Robert N. Essick) were reproduced by the William Blake Archive in 2013.
Hayley, William, The Life of George Romney, Esq. (1809)
For a print of Romney’s self-portrait (engraved by Blake as the frontispiece for Hayley’s biography but never published), see Crosby under Blake 47.3 in Part VI. This print was also reproduced by the William Blake Archive in 2013.
Blake’s published plate, “Sketch of a Shipwreck after Romney,” was reproduced by the William Blake Archive in 2013 (collection of Robert N. Essick).
Hayley, William, Little Tom the Sailor (1800)
The copy in the Sendak collection is watermarked “HAYES | 17”.Blake’s letters of 11 Sept. 1801, 22 Nov. 1802, and 16 Aug. 1803 are on paper watermarked “F HAYES | 1798”.
Three copies (one from the collection of Robert N. Essick and two from the Fitzwilliam Museum) were reproduced by the William Blake Archive in 2013.
Hayley, William, The Triumphs of Temper (1803)
Blake’s plates (collection of Robert N. Essick) were reproduced by the William Blake Archive in 2013.
Hogarth, “Beggar’s Opera”
A copy was offered in James Tregaskis and Son, Caxton Head Catalogue 830 (Sept. 1920), lot 48A (£5.10.0).
“The Idle Laundress” (after Morland)
A copy was offered in James Tregaskis, Caxton Head Catalogue 673 (19 July 1909), lot 59 (with “Industrious Cottager”) (£52.10.0).
“Industrious Cottager” (after Morland)
See “The Idle Laundress,” above.
“Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion” (1773, c. 1810-20)
Copy D
History: Offered at £2.2.0 in Quaritch catalogue
No. 62 (June 1893) and
Miscellaneous Catalogue (Nov. 1893), both “10 in. by 5½ in.”
Josephus, Flavius, Works (?1787-?1790)
A Victoria University in the University of Toronto copy of issue A (see BB #477) has directions to the binder for sixty prints.
New Version
Db Title page as in D, but text as in C rather than reset as in D. Copy acquired in 2013 by Robert N. Essick.
The Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum-Book (1782)
A copy of “The Morning Amusements of Her Royal Highness [and] A Lady in the Full Dress” was offered in James Tregaskis, Caxton Head Catalogue 770 (19 July 1915), lot 94 (£2.2.0).
Scott, John, Poetical Works (1782, 1786, 1795)
Quaritch catalogue No. 539 (1937), lot 432, remarks:
This conclusion is summarized in Quaritch catalogue
No. 979 (1977), lot 50.
Stedman, J. G., Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition (1796, 1806, 1813)
Stedman’s designs for the engravings have not been traced, but a watercolor by him of a black groom with a blood horse in Surinam is reproduced in Gordon N. Ray, The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914 (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library; London: Oxford University Press, 1976) 9.
Blake’s pls. 2-3, 7-8, 10, 12-16 are reproduced (two of them twice) without reference to Stedman’s Narrative or the text of the novel about the slave revolt of 1733-34 in what is now the Virgin Islands, in John Lorenzo Anderson, Night of the Silent Drums (Tortola, 1992), first illustrated Virgin Island edition.First, unillustrated, edition: New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975.
Young, Edward, Night Thoughts (1797)
For references to Young’s Night Thoughts in catalogues of 1800, 1807, 1833, 1835, 1837, 1838, Nov. 1839, and Dec. 1839, see Ripley under Blake 47.3 in Part VI.
Colored Copies
Copy N
Binding: A copy of the 1796 prospectus (4 3/8″ x 5 5/8″) is pasted to the front free endpaper. The front pastedown bears the small rectangular bookplate of EX MUSEO ǀ ARBUTEANO ǀ
… ǀ
W. S. LEWIS and the small round red bookplate of Paul Mellon, along with a clipping describing this copy when it appeared in the Parke-Bernet sale of Newton’s collection on 16 April 1941, lot 138 (“engravings brilliantly colored by William Blake”), plus a statement on the stationery of A. EDWARD NEWTON, ǀ “OAK KNOLL” … written in blue ink by C. B. Tinker dated 11 June 1936 describing “the two copies [A and N] … in the possession of A. Edward Newton.”
Copy V
History: Perhaps this is the copy with “forty-two illustrations … colored by the artist’s own hand”
(ordinarily there were 43 prints)The copy exhibited in 1903 and copy V are the only ones lacking one leaf; N lacks two leaves. that was lent by
William DoxeyWilliam Doxey is not known to have owned any other original work by Blake. of New York to the exhibition in “the art room of the Erie Public Library” organized by the Woman’s Club of Erie, Pennsylvania,
in January 1903.Anon., “An Exhibition in Erie, Penn.,” New York Times 24 Jan. 1903.
Part IV: Catalogues and BibliographiesBeginning with this issue of Blake, I do not report catalogues of 2013 ff. that offer unremarkable copies of books with Blake’s commercial engravings or Blake’s separate commercial prints.
Section A: Individual Catalogues
Editors’ note:
Please consult Bentley, “Sale Catalogues of William Blake’s Works,” for pre-2005 catalogues.
2005 20–21 April
§Bloomsbury Auctions.
Private Press and Limited Editions, Children’s and Illustrated Books and Performing Arts. London, 2005. <Grolier Club>
Includes “William Blake, Trianon Press.”
2005 August–4 September
*
Cloud and Vision. 2005. <
Blake (2006)>
Review
Raymond Edwards, “
Blake Takes Back Seat,”
Catholic Herald 19 Aug. 2005 (All except the “topographical essay” by Michael Phillips form “a dire collection of art school pretentiousness”).
2006 2 May
*Sotheby’s.
William Blake: Designs for Blair’s Grave. New York, 2006. <
Blake (2007)>
Reviews, etc.
*Paul Jeromack, “
Bomb-a-Rama,”
Artnet 29 June 2006.
2007 23 June–7 October
§Robert Flynn Johnson, Karin Breuer, and Louise Siddons.
Rembrandt to Thiebaud: A Decade of Collecting Works on Paper. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2007.
An accompanying volume to an exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, which included “artist books by William Blake ….”
[2009]
Bernard Quaritch.
Around Rousseau, Bernard Quaritch List 2009/19. London, 2009.
50 | [Darwin], The Botanic Garden, vol. 1 (1791), vol. 2 (1789), “very occasional spotting to vol. I, offsetting to title from frontispiece, and from other plates to facing pages, … in contemporary speckled calf, with gilt-tooled spines and gilt borders to sides, gilt morocco lettering pieces, with the armorial bookplate of Sir George Shiffner in both vols., and the contemporary ownership inscription of one A. Lewis 1795 to front free endpaper in both vols.,” with two copies of a print, £2500. |
2011 28 November–2012 19 February
§*
Уильям Блейк и британские визионеры. Каталог выставки [
Uil'yam Bleik i britanskie vizionery. Katalog vystavki] [
William Blake and the British Visionaries. Exhibition Catalogue]. Moscow: Krasnaya ploshchad', 2011. 248 pp. In Russian. <§
Blake (2013)>
Review
*Vera Serdechnaya (see
Blake 47.1 in Part VI).
2012 2 July–21 October
William Blake (1757-1827): Visiones en el arte británico. CaixaForum Madrid. <
Blake (2013)>
Organized by Tate Britain and produced by Obra Social “la Caixa.” Curated by Alison Smith, London. No catalogue was published. There were seventy-four works by Blake, including watercolors, etchings, drawings, and paintings, and pieces by British artists influenced by him: Cecil Collins (1908-89), John Piper (1903-92), Graham Sutherland (1903-80), Ceri Richards (1903-71), and Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005).
A poetry reading celebrating Blake was held on 5 July. Spanish poets Antoni Marí (coordinator), Antonio Martínez Sarrión, Jorge Riechmann, Jordi Doce, and Carlos Marzal read their poems and Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Review
*Michelle Ferreira (see
Blake 47.2 in Part VI).
2013 30 January
*Sotheby’s.
Old Master Drawings. New York, 2013.
285 | The Gambols of Ghosts According with Their Affections Previous to the Final Judgement, watercolor, reproduced (estimate: $400,000-$600,000) [sold for $722,500; at its previous sale on 2 May 2006, lot 12, it was bought in at $520,000]. |
Review, etc.
Colin Gleadell, “William Blake, Craigie Aitchison and Tracey Emin Work Up for Sale,”
Telegraph 29 Jan. 2013.
2013 31 January
*Christie’s.
Old Master and Early British Drawings and Watercolors Including an Important Canadian Collection and a Distinguished Private Collection. New York, 2013.
147 | “An angel, arms upraised, with another figure” <Butlin #692 53-54, Smaller Blake-Varley Sketchbook, p. 53> (20.7 x 15.5 cm.), “indistinct inscription[s] in the hand of John Varley ‘Hotspur …’” on the recto and “it is allways [sic] to keep yourself collected” on the verso, reproduced (estimate: $12,000-$18,000) [$22,500 to Victoria University in the University of Toronto]. |
2013 January
Peter Harrington.
Exceptional Books and Manuscripts, Catalogue 90. London, 2013.
2 | Young, Night Thoughts (1797), “ownership inscription of George Kelly, 1823,” £12,500. |
2013 [January]
*Lowell Libson Limited.
British Paintings & Works on Paper. London: Lowell Libson, 2013.
*“William Blake 1757-1827. The Meeting of a Family in Heaven.” 44-49. Watercolor from the Tulk album, very interesting. [No price; reported on Libson’s web site in Sept. 2013 to have been sold to a “Private Collection, USA.”]
*“William Blake, 1757-1827. Studies for ‘America: A Prophecy’ and an Early Treatment of ‘Job.’ ” 50-55 [no price]. Very interesting sketches.See Martin Butlin, “Harpers and Other Drawings: The Case for a Unified Composition,” Blake 47.2 (fall 2013). It was “still offered on Libson’s web site, early March 2014,” according to Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2013,” Blake 47.4 (spring 2014).
See also the Tulk album of drawings in Division II.
2013 8 February–23 June
*Anon.
Burning Bright: William Blake and the Art of the Book. [Manchester, 2013]. 22 pp., 22 reproductions; no ISBN.
A booklet to accompany the exhibition, curated by Stella Halkyard, at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. According to Burning Bright, the undertaking was a project for the students of Colin Trodd. There is no list of what was exhibited. There is some éclat about the statement that “many of these works have previously lain undetected” (4). Their obscurity to the students may be explained in part by the fact that the section on “Further Reading and Resources” omits Roger R. Easson and Robert N. Essick, William Blake Book Illustrator, Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations, BB, BBS, and “William Blake and His Circle” (Blake), which record the Manchester works reproduced here.
Review, etc.
*Anon., “
Blake Etchings Discovered at the John Rylands Library,”
University of Manchester News 21 Jan. 2013 (“They discovered that a large proportion of the books Blake engraved had found their way into the Rylands collection including a number of engraved illustrations by the artist.” Many of them will go into the exhibition “next month”).
2013 9–10 April
Christie’s.
The Collection of Arthur and Charlotte Vershbow. New York, 2013.
*64Details are as in BBS pp. 112, 130, unless noted; BBS says it was sold by Mrs. George Madison Millard of Pasadena for $100 to Mrs. John Hudson Poole (née Boeing). The birth and death dates are not in BBS. Beginning in March 2013, “Christie’s charged the buyer 25% on amounts up to $75,000, 20% on amounts thereafter to $1.5 million, and 12% on amounts above $1.5 million. … Sotheby’s charged 25% on amounts up to $1 million, 20% between $1 and $2 million, and 12% thereafter” (Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2013,” Blake 47.4 [spring 2014]). | Songs of Innocence and of Experience (p), bound in “late-19th-century English green roan, sides panelled with triple gilt fillets and blind roll-tooled border, spine gilt in compartments with fleurons and lettering, gilt edges, marbled endpapers, laid-paper flyleaves,” “printed in grey-black ink,” “brief autograph description of the book laid in.” Sold by the Pasadena bookseller Alice Parsons Millard (1873-1938) to Caroline Boeing Poole (1884-1932); acquired in 1977 by Bernard M. Rosenthal (b. 1920), who sold it in 1979 to the Vershbows. The otherwise unique selection of plates “corresponds precisely with copy d (printed in sepia …)” (estimate: $100,000-$150,000) [sold for $100,000 ($123,750 with buyer’s premium)]. |
*65 | The Waking of Leonora <Butlin #338>, preliminary watercolor for Bürger, Leonora (1796), tailpiece (p. 16) (estimate: $60,000-$80,000) [sold for $170,000 ($207,750 with buyer’s premium) to an unidentified buyer]. |
2013 14–23 June
eBay. A veteran bookseller of Bath offered a facsimile of
Songs of Innocence and of Experience ([St. Dominic’s Press, “1920’s”]), “54 printed pages,” bound in pale-blue card, with a calligraphic ms. title on the cover (“Songs of | Innocence & | Experience”) and spine and, in the same hand, a gift inscription from Eric Gill to his son-in-law Denis Tegetmeier (d. March 1987): “Denis T. from | EG | 25.Dec.1931” [sold for £390].
The reproductions show the title pages of Songs [pl. 1], Innocence [pl. 3], and Experience [pl. 29], printed in reddish brown, 12 x 15.5 cm., with red framing lines round the design (2 on pl. 1, 1 on pls. 3, 29), numbered in red ink within the top right corner of the framing lines (1, 3, 29, implying an overall order of pls. 1-54). There is no coloring, but on pl. 1 the fig leaves are outlined in black ink.
Probably these are the prints from the facsimile of the Songs by Quaritch (1893).
2013 25 June
§Bonhams.
Fine Books and Manuscripts. New York, 2013.
3217 | Blair, The Grave (1808), quarto, uncut, in original boards worn and rebacked, “paper label to upper cover,” quarter morocco slipcase, inscription of 22 February 1816 by James Neagle [“Mr Neagle” was an original subscriber] (estimate: $2000-$3000) [not sold]. |
2013 3 July
§Sotheby’s.
Old Master and British Drawings. London, 2013.
160 | Joseph Ordering Simeon to Be Bound <Butlin #158>, pen and watercolor over pencil. 48.2 x 33.8 cm., reproduced (estimate: £20,000-£30,000) [£27,500 to John Windle on behalf of Robert N. Essick]. |
2013 5 July–1 September
Revolutionary Light: Blake, [Anish] Kapoor, Turner. Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.
The Blakes are his designs for Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity and The Ancient of Days.
2013 August
Bernard Quaritch.
English Books and Manuscripts, New Acquisitions, Summer 2013: Music, Poetry, the Stage, Beckford, Byron, Milton, Broadsides, Translation. London, 2013. <Huntington>
32 | Hayley, The Triumphs of Temper (1803), “in contemporary marbled calf, spine gilt with wheel motif, red morocco label; ownership inscription of Louisa Anne Hope dated 1807, bookplate of her descendant Julius Hope, Baron von Szilassy,” £650. |
2013 17 September
Sotheby’s.
Prints and Multiples—Old Master, Modern and Contemporary. London, 2013.
1 | Job (1826), “‘Proof’ edition,” from the estate of Mrs. Adolph (Bucks) Weil, Jr. (estimate: £15,000-£20,000) [£31,250 with buyer’s premium]. |
2013 29 October
Christie’s.
The Collection of Arthur and Charlotte Vershbow, Part Four: The Neoclassical, Romantic, Symbolist and Modern Periods. New York, 2013.
784 | Bürger, Leonora (1796) (estimate: $3000-$4000) [$3000 to John Windle for a private customer]. |
785 | Young, Night Thoughts (1797), with the “Explanation” leaf, tall (42.5 x 33.2 cm.), uncut (estimate: $10,000-$15,000) [$10,000]. |
786 | Hayley, The Triumphs of Temper (1803), lacking half-title (estimate: $800-$1200) [$813 to John Windle for stock]. |
787 | Hayley, Ballads (1805), “original boards, paper spine label, uncut,” with a slipcase (estimate: $1500-$2000) [$2500]. |
788 | Blair, The Grave (1808), large-paper proof, text watermarked “J Whatman 1801,” bound by Charles Hering in cathedral style (estimate: $10,000-$15,000) [$12,500]. |
789 | Blair, The Grave (1813), text watermarked “Edmeads & Pine 1802” or “Edmeads & Co 1811,” “all finely hand colored,” “possibly the master copy, colored by Blake.” “According to Martin Butlin, the present copy appears to have been colored by Blake himself”; “Butlin proposes that the coloring of this copy is consistent with Blake’s coloring scheme, and two plates show ‘heavy areas’ typical of his coloring.” “The Death of the Strong Wicked Man” and “The Reunion of the Soul & the Body” are reproduced, showing very Blake-like coloring, especially in the red flames (estimate: $60,000-$80,000) [$93,750]. |
790 | Virgil pen, ink, and watercolor drawing for “Colinet and Thenot” (estimate: $40,000-$60,000) [$40,000 to John Windle for Robert N. Essick]. |
791 | Virgil (1821), “wood and steel-engraved plates,” signed on a flyleaf by “S. K. Blake,” with Frances Hofer’s bookplate (estimate: $5000-$7000) [$17,500]. |
792 | Job (1826), “original buff boards,” paper label, wove paper (estimate: $30,000-$50,000) [$68,750]. |
793 | The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ([Camden Hotten], 1868) (estimate: $700-$1000) [$688 to John Windle for stock]. |
794 | Facsimile of What Is Believed to Be the Last Replica of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Quaritch, 1893) (estimate: $500-$700) [$688 to John Windle for stock]. |
795 | Auguries of Innocence (1959), wood engravings by Leonard Baskin (estimate: $800-$1200) [$1188]. |
Section B: Collections and Selections
G. E. Bentley, Jr. “Sale Catalogues of Blake’s Works, 1791-2013.” Toronto, 2013. <http://library.vicu.utoronto.ca/collections/special_collections/bentley_blake_collection>.
Detailed lists of the Blake contents of about a thousand catalogues, recorded in chronological order.
Part V: Books Owned by William Blake the Poet
Editors’ note:
Please consult Bentley, “Sale Catalogues of William Blake’s Works,” for further particulars of catalogues mentioned in this section.
Aeschylus, Tragedies (1779)
It was offered in James Tregaskis, Caxton Head Catalogue 809 (16 Dec. 1918), lot 38 (£20), and James Tregaskis and Son, Caxton Head Catalogue 833 (20 Dec. 1920), lot 52 (£20).
Part VI: Criticism, Biography, and Scholarly Studies
A B C D F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
A
§Albertovna, Tokareva Galina. “The Myth in the Literary System of William Blake.” PhD, 2005.
Anon. “Artistes anglais.—William Blake. (I).” Gazette littéraire: Revue française et étrangère de la littérature, des sciences, des beaux-arts [Paris] 1, no. 17 (25 March 1830): 265-68. <Bibliothèque nationale de France> In French. B. [Fr. Grille].The name of Fr. Grille (François-Joseph Grille [1782-1853]) is given on the title page of the volume but not on the essay. “Blake, peintre, graveur et poète anglais.” Le bric-à-brac: avec son catalogue raisonné. Vol. 1. Paris, 1853. 293-301. <Bibliothèque nationale de France> C. François Grille. “Blake, peintre, graveur et poëte anglais.” Revue universelle des arts 14 (1861): 372-75. <Blake (2010)>
The Gazette littéraire account is an adjusted translation of Cunningham’s ¶2-3, 8-12, 14-29, 36-39, 41-42, 44-47, 49 (¶39, 44-47, 49 much contracted). A footnote says: “Nous avons emprunté les détails contenus dans cette notice à l’ouvrage intitulé: Lives of English artists, par M. Allan Cunningham, qui a été récemment publié à Londres.”The work cited is The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, vol. 2 (1830) 140-79.
The accounts by François Grille give Cunningham ¶11-12, 18, 37, 47 via Gazette littéraire. That in Bric-à-brac is corrected and improved in Revue universelle.
Anon. “Blake (William), graveur, peintre et poëte anglais.” Dictionnaire encyclopédique usuel. Ed. Charles Saint-Laurent. 4th ed. Paris: Librairie scientifique, industrielle et agricole de Lacroix-Comon, 1858. 149. <Bibliothèque nationale de France> One short paragraph in French.
Anon. “City’s Historic Link to Blake.” Chichester Observer 28 Nov. 2007.
The 4′ x 6′ coat of arms was probably in the guildhall when Blake was tried for sedition.
Anon. “Felpham School Children Follow in Footsteps of Blake.” Chichester Observer 31 March 2008.
By writing poetry.
Anon. “Theatre: Blake Remembered at West Dean [College].” Chichester Observer 11 Jan. 2009.
Announcement of a “performance of the life and work of Blake.” The college has a tapestry of “The Ancient of Days … woven by the West Dean Tapestry Studio.”
Arnault, A. V., A. Jay, E. Jouy, J. Norvins, et autres hommes de lettres. Biographie nouvelle des contemporains ou Dictionnaire historique et raisonné de tous les hommes qui, depuis la Révolution française, ont acquis de la célébrité par leurs actions, leurs écrits, leurs erreurs ou leurs crimes, soit en France, soit dans les pays étrangers. Vol. 19 (San-Thou). Paris: Librairie historique, 1825. 53-54. In French.
The entry for “Schiavonetti (Louis)” mentions his engravings “d’après Blake, pour … le Tombeau de Blair.”
B
Barber, John. “Wild Things: Maurice Sendak’s ravishing posthumous work was inspired by his older brother, but also by William Blake’s visionary Songs of Innocence and [of] Experience.” Globe and Mail [Toronto] 9 Feb. 2013: R18.
A review of Maurice Sendak, My Brother’s Book (HarperCollins, 2013). [One design reproduced is quite like the star-struck “WILLIAM” (Milton pl. 29), which is paired with Blake’s brother “ROBERT” on Milton pl. 33.]
*Barush, Kathryn. “Visions of Mortality: The vast collection of antiquarian Francis Douce incorporated a wide range of images of death and the afterlife. These included a set of William Blake’s designs for The Grave, now in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, resonant Romantic additions to an age-old pictorial tradition.” Apollo no. 605 (Jan. 2013): 56-62.
For details of the Blake prints, see Blair’s Grave in Part III.
§Baulch, David M. “‘Like a pillar of fire above the Alps’: William Blake and the Prospect of Revolution.” European Romantic Review 24.3 (2013): 279-85.
*Biles, Jeremy. “O Rose, I’m Sick Too: Notes on William Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose.’” Cultural Society 14 May 2007.
On the productive irritants of the poem.
§Bill, Stanley. “Crisis in the Christian Dialectic: Czeslaw Milosz Reads William Blake and Fyodor Dostoevsky for a Secular Age.” Northwestern PhD, 2013.
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 46, number 4 (spring 2013)
*Robert N. Essick. “
Blake in the Marketplace, 2012.” (Comprehensive, precise, exciting.)
*Małgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys. “
‘Life exhal’d in milky fondness’—Becoming a Mother in William Blake’s The Book of Thel.” 29 pars. (“Thel’s dilemma—whether to become a mother” is “proof of her maturity and independent spirit” [par. 1].)
*G. E. Bentley, Jr. “
Blake and Stedman as Costumiers: Curious Copies of Blake’s Engravings in 1821.” 21 pars. (Ten of Blake’s engravings for Stedman are adapted in the bilingual edition of Jules Ferrario,
Le costume ancien et moderne [Milan, 1817-1826], with 1500 folio prints.)
Minute Particular
Angus Whitehead. “
‘another, but far more amiable enthusiast’: References to Catherine and William Blake in the Literary Gazette and La Belle Assemblée (1830).” 4 pars. (A review of Cunningham’s
Lives with a significant new account of Blake.)
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 47, number 1 (summer 2013)
*G. E. Bentley, Jr., with the assistance of Hikari Sato for Japanese publications and of Li-Ping Geng for Chinese publications. “
William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Publications and Discoveries in 2012.” (2012 was “a bumper year for records of previously unrecorded Blake publications” [1099 entries], especially from
WorldCat, with 112 publications in Chinese and the discovery of George Cumberland’s sketchbook and meticulous imitations of Blake’s Stedman engravings [Paris, 1798].)
Minute Particular
*Kurt Fosso. “
Blake’s ‘Introduction’ [to Innocence] and Hesiod’s Theogony.” 9 pars.
Reviews
*Linda Freedman.
Christopher Rowland, Blake and the Bible. 6 pars. (A “deeply scholarly … truly valuable contribution to Blake studies.”)
*Vera Serdechnaya.
William Blake and British Visionary Art, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, and its catalogue, Уильям Блейк и британские визионеры. Каталог выставки [Uil'yam Bleik i britanskie vizionery. Katalog vystavki] [William Blake and the British Visionaries. Exhibition Catalogue]. 11 pars., plus large, unlabeled photographs of the exhibition. (The “lavish” catalogue included works by Blake’s successors; “the queue [was] half a kilometer long,” but the responses were mostly perplexed.)
*Vera Serdechnaya.
Уильям Блейк. Песни невинности и опыта: William Blake. Songs of Innocence and of Experience [W]. 5 pars. (“For the first time in Russia, this edition reproduces the illuminated prints of the
Songs, and all translations [by M. Falikman, M. Kostionova, A. Kruglov, S. Lichacheva, and M. Lipkin] are new.” There are “introductions by Richard Holmes [from the Folio Society edition of 1992] and Gregory Kruzhkov as well as critical commentary by Sasha Dugdale,” with an appendix that gives “alternative translations.”)
J. B. Mertz.
Michael Phillips, ed., The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [B]. 8 pars. (This is “a valuable tool,” though “I find several instances where Phillips’s transcription does not agree with … this reproduction of copy B.”)
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 47, number 2 (fall 2013)
Linda Freedman. “
Blake, Duncan, and the Politics of Writing from Myth.” 46 pars. (If “we read both poets [Blake and Robert Duncan] alongside each other, we arrive at a better understanding of the involvement of politics with hermetic vision” [par. 1].)
*Jonathan Roberts. “
William Blake’s Visionary Landscape near Felpham.” 39 pars. (A fine essay showing that Blake’s poem about “My first Vision of Light” in his letter of 2 October 1800 was probably made at the same time as his
Landscape near Felpham <Butlin #368 (c. 1800)> drawn when “Blake … must have been in a boat, a little out to sea” “at full tide” [par. 16] on the morning of 2 October [the tide was high at the right time only on 30 September to 2 October (par. 20)]. Blake’s watercolor of
Jacob’s Ladder <#438, c. 1805> may have been made about the same time, for the letter to Nancy Flaxman of 14 September 1800 refers to where “The Ladder of Angels descends” to “My Cot” in Felpham [par. 25].)
Minute Particular
J. B. Mertz. “
The Responses of William Blake and Joseph Priestley to Two Swedenborgian Ideas.” 5 pars. (Both Blake and Priestley mock Swedenborg’s “ideas of
space, or
duration,” as Priestley put it.)
Reviews
*Michelle Ferreira.
William Blake (1757-1827): Visiones en el arte británico, CaixaForum Madrid. 13 pars.
R. Paul Yoder.
Susanne M. Sklar, Blake’s Jerusalem as Visionary Theatre: Entering the Divine Body. 10 pars. (“It is in Sklar’s focus on visionary theatre that her book holds the most promise … [but] Sklar lacks an adequate working definition of ’visionary theatre.’”)
Discussion
*Martin Butlin. “
Harpers and Other Drawings: The Case for a Unified Composition.” 6 pars. (A persuasive argument that the newly discovered drawing from the Tulk collection offered for sale by Lowell Libson has a single subject in diminishing perspective.)
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 47, number 3 (winter 2013-14)
*Mark Crosby. “
‘Ah! Romney!’: Blake’s ‘Supernaculum’ Portrait Engraving of George Romney.” 20 pars. (A proof before letters of George Romney’s self-portrait, acquired in 2011 by Robert N. Essick, may be the proof for the frontispiece to Hayley’s
Life of George Romney [1809], which Blake sent to Hayley in December 1804. The print is on wove paper trimmed inside the platemark [image size: 14.5 x 18.4 cm.]. This is the only traced impression of Blake’s print.)
*Abraham Samuel Shiff. “
Blake’s Priestly Blessing: God Blesses Job.” 29 pars., with 21 Blake reproductions.
Minute Particular
Wayne C. Ripley. “
New Night Thoughts Sightings.” 11 pars.
Reviews
Mark Lussier.
Claire Colebrook, Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the Digital. 6 pars. (A “well-written and energetic” book that “breaks open new critical spaces,” about which there is “much to admire,” but it will “perhaps not [be] pleasing to all Blake scholars,” such as Lussier.)
Bruce Graver.
Jonathan Roberts, Blake. Wordsworth. Religion. 4 pars.
*The Blake Society. Calendar of Events for 2013. London: St. James’s Church, 197 Piccadilly, [May] 2013. Square octavo, 20 pp., no ISBN, handsomely illustrated.
“Our present ambitions include buying Blake’s two surviving homes” [17 South Molton Street, London, and Blake’s cottage, Felpham, Sussex] (3).
§Boutilier, Emily Gold. “Showstopper.” Amherst 64.2 (winter 2012): 26-29.
About the acquisition of The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter <Butlin #417> by Amherst College.
*Bruder, Helen P., and Tristanne Connolly, eds. Sexy Blake. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 8o, xii, 260 pp.; ISBN: 9781137332837.
Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly. “Introduction: ‘Bring me my Arrows of desire’: Sexy Blake in the Twenty-First Century.” 1-18.
I: Violence and Dominance
1. *Lucy Cogan. “Subjectivity, Mutuality and Masochism: Ahania in
The Book of Ahania and
The Four Zoas.” 21-34.
2. Ayako Wada. “Visions of the Love Triangle and Adulterous Birth in Blake’s
The Four Zoas.” 35-46.
3. *Yoko Ima-Izumi. “Blood in Blake’s Poetry of Gender Struggle.” 47-63.
4. Michelle Leigh Gompf. “Ripped from Complacency: Violence and Feminist Moments in Blake.” 65-80.
II: Chastity, Redemption and Feminine Desire
5. Sean David Nelson. “In the ‘Lilly of Havilah’: Sapphism and Chastity in Blake’s
Jerusalem.” 83-97.
6. Magnus Ankarsjö. “‘Abstinence sows sand all over’: William Lost in Paradise.” 99-112.
7. David Shakespeare. “‘The Sight of All These Things’: Sexual Vision and Obscurity in Blake’s
Milton.” 113-24.
8. *Susanne Sklar. “Erotic Spirituality in Blake’s
Last Judgement.” 125-40.
9. Kathryn Sullivan Kruger. “Blake’s Bowers of Bliss: The
Gitagovinda,
The Four Zoas, and Two Illustrations for
L’Allegro.” 141-58.
III: Conceptual Sex, Conceptual Art
10. Tommy Mayberry. “Hélyos and Ceylèn [A Poison Tree].” 161-76.
11. Paige Morgan. “The Hinges on the Doors of Marriage: The Body’s Openness to Information in the Art of Stelarc and Blake.” 177-92.
12. Angus Whitehead and Joel Gwynne. “The Sexual Life of Catherine B.: Women Novelists, Blake Scholars and Contemporary Fabulations of Catherine Blake.” 193-210. (The women novelists are Lachman and Warner.)
13. Philippa Simpson. “Blake and Porn.” 211-18.
IV: Coda
14. Christopher Z. Hobson. “Normalizing Perversity: Blake and Homosexuality in 2013.” 221-34.
15. Christopher Z. Hobson. “Commemorating the Vere-street ‘Monsters.’” 235-37.
§Byrne, Joseph E. “Worlds Trodden and Untrodden: Political Disillusionment, Literary Displacement, and the Conflicted Publicity of British Romanticism.” Maryland PhD, 2013.
A study of William Wordsworth, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Blake.
C
§Cabrera, Víctor. “William Blake arriba a la estación violenta” [poem]. Anuario de poesía mexicana 2008. Ed. María Baranda. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009. In Spanish.
Castanedo, Fernando. “Blake, a vueltas con Dios.” El País (Babelia) [Madrid] 22 Sept. 2012: 2. In Spanish.
On Blake’s visionary powers versus his mysticism.
§Cogan, Lucy Nicole. “William Blake’s Bible of Hell, and the Fall into Materialism and Language.” Cambridge PhD, 2010. 271 leaves.
Colebrook, Claire. Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the Digital. 2012. <§Blake (2013)>
Review
Mark Lussier (see
Blake 47.3, above).
§Collé-Bak, Nathalie. “Spiritual Transfers: William Blake’s Iconographic Treatment of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Bunyan Studies no. 16 (2012): 32-51.
Cooper, Andrew M. William Blake and the Productions of Time. Farnham [Surrey]: Ashgate, 2013. 4o, xiv, 348 pp., 36 black-and-white reproductions; ISBN: 9781409444411.
“Two or three pages from Chapter 2 [‘Seeing Voices in Songs of Innocence’] were co-authored with Michael Simpson in ‘The High-Tech Luddite of Lambeth: Blake’s Eternal Hacking,’ The Wordsworth Circle 30 (1999): 125-31,” and “a shorter version of Chapter 6 [‘Freedom from The Book of Urizen’] appeared as ‘Freedom from Blake’s Book of Urizen,’ Studies in Romanticism 48 (2009): 187-218” (xiv).
“This book … is a biography … of the life allegory disclosed by his [Blake’s] developing poetic practice” ([1]).
§Corby, James. “Blake, Yeats, Larkin: Nihilism and the Indifferent Consolation of Post-romanticism.” New Questions on Literary Criticism. Ed. Efe Duyan. Istanbul: DAKAM Publishing, 2012. 159-69.
§Correa Urquiza, Martín. “William Blake: Dulce Corazón Satánico.” Cañamo: La revista de la cultura del cannabis no. 130 (Oct. 2008): 58-59. In Spanish.
*Coughlan, Sean. “School Librarian Finds Fake Blake Poem.” BBC News 19 June 2013 (also New York Times 19 June 2013).
Thomas Pitchford discovered that “Two Sunflowers Move into the Yellow Room” in Nancy Willard’s A Visit to William Blake’s Inn (1981) was “widely attributed to William Blake, including in school reading lists,” particularly in the United States.
Cunningham, Allan. “William Blake.” The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Vol. 2. 1830. 140-79. <BB #1433, BBS p. 445>
Review
§Anon., “
Monthly View of New Publications, Music, the English and Foreign Drama, the Fine Arts, Literary and Scientific Intelligence, &c.,”
La Belle Assemblée ns no. 63 (March 1830): 120-23 (a review of Cunningham discusses Blake).
D
*Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. 1965 …. <BB #1445, BBS p. 447> G. 2013.
§Dumitrana, Magdalena. “The Christian Poetry and the Formation of an Intercultural Attitude: ‘The Little Black Boy’ by William Blake.” Euromentor Journal 3.2 (June 2012): 1.
F
Fernández Campón, Miguel. “William Blake (el libro como concreción de lo humano).” Libros con arte, arte con libros. María del Mar Lozano Bartolozzi (coord.). Badajoz: Universidad de Extremadura, 2007. 279-89. ISBN: 9788498520262. In Spanish.
§Fernie, Ewan. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” The Demonic: Literature and Experience. Foreword by Jonathan Dollimore. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. Chapter 13 (165-68).
§Fitzsimons, Andrew. “William Blake’s Tavern.” Gakushuin Daigaku Eibun Gakkaishi 2012 [Journal of the English Literary Society of Gakushuin University 2012] (2013): 35.
Follansbee, Eleanor. Heavenly History: An Account of Heavenly Architecture after Dante, Milton, Swedenborg and Blake. 1927. <BB #1624> B. §2011. ISBN: 9781258024888. A digitized version.
fragmentumThe italicized initial letter of “fragmentum” is obscured when the title is normalized in italics. The online journal is sponsored by the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil.
*No. 34: “William Blake, Poeta, Pintor e Artista-Gravurista” (2012)
Enéias Farias Tavares. “
William Blake, Poet, Painter, and Artist-Printmaker: An Interview with Michael Phillips.” (An illuminating autobiographical account of the life and scholarly career of Michael Phillips from 1940 in New York to 2012.)
Enéias Farias Tavares. “
William Blake, Poeta, Pintor e Artista-Gravurista: Uma entrevista com Michael Phillips.” In Portuguese.
Enéias Farias Tavares. “
Figures/Figuras.” In English and Portuguese. (Sixteen reproductions especially showing Phillips imitating Blake’s plates and printing them.)
“
Referências Bibliográficas.”
“Referências das Imagens.”
Enéias Farias Tavares. “
Autores.” In Portuguese. (On Blake, Phillips, and Tavares.)
G
§Gades, Andrew. “Music, Image, and Text: A Multi-Domain Analytical Approach to Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” Florida State PhD, 2013. 153 pp.
Gallant, Christine. “Blake’s Coded Designs of Slave Revolts.” Wordsworth Circle 42.3 (summer 2011): 211-17. <§Blake (2013)>
“The designs encode his real intent as the texts do not … the capsule history of this Revolt up to 1794,” but the resemblances are often pretty approximate, and it is curious to find evidence of “the Haitian Revolution” in Blake’s copies of Stedman’s designs of Surinam.
*Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus.” 1863, 1880, 1907 …. <BB #1680, BBS p. 484, Blake (1999, 2002, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013)>
1863
The copy inscribed “Robert Browning, from Mrs. Gilchrist” (Browning’s poem “Pictor Ignotus” supplied the subtitle of Gilchrist’s biography) was offered at Sotheby’s London, 7 June 1991, lot 113, and is now in the collection of Mark Samuels Lasner on loan to the University of Delaware Library.
A copy inscribed “Clarence Cook | from Julia Sept 8th 1867” with a letter to Cook from Herbert H. Gilchrist, 28 April 1893, about “dispersing my collection of drawings & engravings of William Blake” is in Victoria University in the University of Toronto.
“W E Frost’s copy ^with his notes^ who collaborated on it”The only known association of William Edward Frost (1810-77), R.A., with Blake or Gilchrist’s life is the acknowledgement that he provided the transcription of Blake’s “To the Public” (2: 263-64), which is untraced and otherwise unknown. was acquired on 14 April 1910 by William Augustus White, according to his acquisitions list (Houghton Library, Harvard). I have not traced Frost’s copy.
The copy “with MS. Notes by the late Mr. Linnell” offered in Hodgson’s catalogue of 28-29, 31 May 1906, with “a Selection from the Property of the Late John Linnell, Esq., Jun.,” lot 524 (day 2), has not been traced since.
The copy annotated by Blake’s disciple George Richmond is in the collection of Stephen Keynes.
D. G. “Rossetti’s copy of Gilchrist’s life of Blake, which contains in the margins numerous pencil annotations in his autograph,” and thirty-two leaves with his transcriptions of various portions of Blake’s Notebook were offered in Ellis & White, Catalogue 52 (London, [?1883]), lot 67, and F. S. Ellis, Catalogue of the Very Choice Collection … Formed by Mr. Ellis, 16 Nov. 1885 + 11 days, lot 608 (day 3) [sold for £85]. They have not been traced since.
The copy of vol. 1 signed by Adam White, 21 Aug. 1865, with a letter of 17 May 1866 to White from “Youknowwho” [John Linnell] about “slanderous assertions” about Blake,Youknowwho’s letter is quoted in the 1959 catalogue and in BR(2) xxvii. The volume included a visionary head of Edward III(?) <Butlin #736> sold at Sotheby Parke-Bernet, 13 Jan. 1970, lot 124. was sold at Sotheby’s, 20-22 July 1959, lot 521 (£7 to the dealer J. Schwartz), and has not been traced since.
Review
*Anon. [Francis Turner Palgrave],
Quarterly Review 117, no. 233 (Jan. 1865): 1-27 (“We consider this book one of the most satisfactory amongst our recent biographies” [1]).
See also Anon., London Quarterly Review 117, no. 233 (Jan. 1865): 1-13. A summary appears in the London Review (28 Jan. 1865): 131.
1880
D. G. Rossetti’s additions for Gilchrist (1880), 60 pp., were offered at Sotheby’s, 27 July 1911. They may be the set of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ms. notes for Gilchrist (1880), vol. 2, in the Delaware Art Museum (Wilmington).
Review
Frederick Wedmore, “William Blake,”
Temple Bar (1881) …. <
BB #2939,
Blake (2012)> Anon.,
New York Times 12 June 1881.
*Goldsmith, Steven. Blake’s Agitation: Criticism and the Emotions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. 4o, viii, 406 pp., 36 black-and-white illustrations; ISBN: 9781421408064.
A theory-laden work that deals, inter alia, with Kenzaburo Oe’s Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age (219-25).
His “Blake’s Agitation,” South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (1996): 753-96 <§Blake (1998)>, was “an early version of chapter 1,” and “parts of” his “William Blake and the Future of Enthusiasm,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 63 (2009): 439-60 <Blake (§2010, 2011)>, reappear in “the introduction and chapter 5” (318).
*Goldsmith, Steven. “‘Cracked Across’: Blake, Milton, and the Noise of History.” Studies in Romanticism 51.3 (fall 2012): 305-42.
Goldsmith “wonder[s] why Blake never illustrated” Samson Agonistes, which “haunted” him.
§Gompf, Michelle Leigh. Thomas Harris and William Blake: Allusions in the Hannibal Lecter Novels. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014. 185 pp.; ISBN: 9781476606163.
§Goode, Mike. “The Joy of Looking: What Blake’s Pictures Want.” Representations 119.1 (June 2012): 1-36.
§Goss, Erin M. “What Is Called Corporeal: Blake and the Body’s Origin.” Revealing Bodies: Anatomy, Allegory, and the Grounds of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013. Chapter 3 (87-118).
It is about “Blake’s assertion of the body’s ‘Fallacy’ and ‘Imposture’ as it appears in the narration of the body’s origin” (89).
“Much of chapter 3” is drawn from “What Is Called Corporeal: William Blake and the Question of the Body,” Eighteenth Century 51.4 (winter 2010): 413-30 <§Blake (2012)>.
H
*Haggarty, Sarah. Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange. 2010. <Blake (§2011, 2012, 2013)>
Review
Matthew Rowlinson,
Studies in Romanticism 51.3 (fall 2012): 461-63 (a “smart and original book”).
§Haggarty, Sarah. “What Is the Price of Experience?: William Blake and Gift Relationships.” Cambridge PhD, 2006. 248 leaves.
*Halkyard, Stella. “Pictures from a Library: 3 Regaining a Corner of Paradise: William Blake’s Pastorals of Virgil.” PN Review 38.6 (July-Aug. 2012).
§Hannah, Daniel. “Invitations and Withdrawals: Queer Romantic Ecologies in William Blake’s The Book of Thel and John Clare’s ‘The Nightingale’s Nest.’” Essays in Romanticism 20 (2013): 1-18.
It is about “the ways in which queer desires surface … as fissures in their ecological imaginaries.”
*Hiraide, Takashi. William Blake no Bat (William Blake’s Bat). Tokyo: Genki Shobo, 2012. 215 pp. In Japanese.
A collection of essays on trips, sports, and driving, in one of which the author discusses a cricket bat in the illustration of “The Ecchoing Green.”
I
*Imamura, Takeshi. “Johann Heinrich Füssli und William Blake: Ihre Kunst und die Gordon-Aufstände.” Tokyo Rika Daigaku Kiyo (Studies in Liberal Arts and Sciences, Tokyo University of Science) no. 45 (2013): 183-93. In German with a Japanese synopsis.
J
§Jackson, Kevin. “A William Blake Alphabet.” Letters of Introduction: An A-Z of Cultural Heroes and Legends. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2004. Chapter 1 (1-24).
Jackson-Stops [estate agent]. “Cottage for sale Felpham, West Sussex PO22 7EB.” 2013.
“Formerly the home of William Blake,” “most picturesque”; “Guide Price of £650,000.”
§Jenkins-Handy, David. “Visual Culture and Visionary Satire: The Bodies Politic of William Blake.” Birmingham PhD, 2004. 391 pp.
*Jesse, Jennifer G. William Blake’s Religious Vision: There’s a Methodism in His Madness. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2013. 4o, xiv, 297 pp.; ISBN: 9780739177907.
A serious, methodical book; an “educated guess about the religious insights expressed in Blake’s [literary] works” (7); an attempt “to contextualize Blake’s works theologically” (99). She is concerned particularly with the audiences Blake addresses.
§Jessen, Elisabeth Engell. “Conversion as a Narrative, Visual, and Stylistic Mode in William Blake’s Works.” Oxford DPhil, 2013.
§Johnston, Kenneth R. “Blake’s America, the Prophecy That Failed: William Blake (1757-1827).” Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Chapter 18 (307-22).
Juninus. “Conversations on the Arts.” Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics no. 56 (Aug. 1813): 63.
In a conversation about Hogarth’s works, he mentions “Beggars’ Opera, Mr. Walker as Macheath, Miss Fenton as Polly, W. Blake sc.” Juninus gives similar information about the print in “On Splendour of Colours, &c.,” Repository of Arts 4 (Sept. 1810): 130-31; see BR(2) 304-05. The 1813 reference was first recorded by Robert N. Essick in an e-mail to me of February 2013.
Junod, Karen. “Crabb Robinson, Blake, and Perthes’s Vaterländisches Museum (1810-1811).” European Romantic Review 23.4 (Aug. 2012): 435-51.
Chiefly about Perthes and Crabb Robinson’s role “as mediator of English literature to Germany” (435).
K
Kato, Kazutoshi. “W. Blake no Muku to Keiken no Uta: Rhythm no Jikken to iu Sokumen kara (An Experiment of Poetic Rhythm: Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience).” Mulberry no. 62 (2013): 21-41. In Japanese.
Kellogg, Carolyn. “Tyger, Tyger burning bright: William Blake’s Cottage Is for Sale.” Los Angeles Times 15 July 2013.
For $978,000.
§Koelb, Janice Hewlett. “Reading and Rhetorical Generation: The Example of Blake’s Thel.” Literary Studies and the Pursuits of Reading. Ed. Eric Downing, Jonathan M. Hess, and Richard V. Benson. Rochester: Camden House–Boydell & Brewer, 2012. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Chapter 7 (148-67).
§Kumar, R. Ashok. “Perception of Syntactic Deviations in Poetry—A Study of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence.” Language in India 12.10 (Oct. 2012): 83.
L
Lane, Louisa. “William Blake.” Guernsey and Jersey Magazine 5, ed. F. B. T. (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1838): 70-75. <British Library: PP 6071>
A brief summary of Blake’s life (70-71), silently paraphrased and quoted from Cunningham,“at ten years of age he became an artist, and at twelve a poet” (Cunningham ¶3, Lane p. 70); “she [Kate] seemed to have been created on purpose for Blake” (Cunningham ¶10, Lane p. 70); “to the wildest flights of his imagination she bowed the knee” (Cunningham ¶10, Lane p. 71). Lane quotes (71) somewhat approximately from Cunningham ¶47-48. serves as an introduction to “The Last Scene in Blake’s Life” (71-75) in blank verse.
This is the only known dramatic extract based on Blake.
Louisa Lane (1812-83), daughter of Major-General Ambrose Lane and Mary Le Meurier, married the Rev. Thomas Clarke and lived in his parish of Wood Eaton, Oxfordshire, until his death in 1865. She then returned to Guernsey. She published extensively under her married name about the natural history and folklore of the Channel Islands (e.g., Folk-Lore of Guernsey and Sark [1880]).See Edgar MacCulloch, Guernsey Folk Lore, ed. Edith Carey (London: Elliot Stock; Guernsey: F. Clarke, 1903).
For earlier poems about Blake, see Felicia Hemans, “The Painter’s Last Work: A Scene,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 31 (Feb. 1832): 220-21, and Lucy Hooper, “The Fairy’s Funeral,” Long Island Star 27 Nov. 1833: 1.
§Lang, Bernhard. “Meeting in Heaven according to John Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress. With a Note on an Illustration by William Blake.” Tod und Jenseits in der Schriftkultur der Frühen Neuzeit. Ed. Marion Kobelt-Groch and Cornelia Niekus Moore. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008.
Language. Philology. Culture
Язык. Словесность. Культура
No. 1 ([March] 2013)
1. Vera Serdechnaya. “A Dialogue in the Doors.” 8-11. In Russian and English. (A summary.)
Blake Studies
2. Andrew Solomon. “William Blake’s Great Task.” 13-19. In English and Russian.
3. *Gerald Eades Bentley, Jr. “Blake’s Loose Canons.” 20-45. In English. (About editing Blake, chiefly
William Blake’s Writings [1978].)
4. Thomas Stearns Eliot. “Blake.” Trans. D. Smirnov-Sadovsky. 46-51. In Russian.
5. Tatyana Alexandrovna Tyutvinova. “An Artistic Method by William Blake: ‘Mystification’ or ‘Prophecy’?” 52-59. Text in Russian, footnotes, references, and abstract in English.
6. Daniel Gustafsson. “Blake and Orthodoxy.” 60-77. In English. (The orthodoxy is Eastern religious Orthodoxy.)
7. Vera Vladimirovna Serdechnaya. “‘Russian’ Blake: Translations, Research, Allusions.” 78-94. Text and footnotes in Russian, abstract in English.
8. *Dmitri Smirnov-Sadovsky [pen name of Dmitri Nikolaevich Smirnov]. “‘Bard’ by William Blake.” 95-107. Text and footnotes in Russian, quotation of “The Bard” from the
Descriptive Catalogue in English.
9. *Tat'yana Eduardovna Koksharova. “Caterpillar—Cocoon—Butterfly as a Symbolic Triad in Poetry and Painting of William Blake.” 108-20. Text and footnotes in Russian, abstract and references in English.
10. Marina Alekseevna Vashchenko and Aleksandr Vladimirovich Vashchenko. “The Dichotomy of New and Old World in the Mystics of William Blake.” 121-30. Text in Russian, footnotes, abstract and references in English.
11. Galina Al'bertovna Tokareva. “William Blake’s Philosophy of Laughter and the Romantic Excess.” 131-54. Text in Russian, abstract and references in English.
Translations
12. Vera Serdechnaya. “
An Island in the Moon by W. Blake: Two Russian Translations.” 155-57. In Russian and English.
13. “Island on the Moon” (1784). Trans. G. A. Tokareva. 158-82. Text and footnotes in Russian.
14. “Island on the Moon” (1784). Trans. D. Smirnov-Sadovsky. 183-207. Text and footnotes in Russian.
15. “Authors and Translators.” 208-18. In English and Russian, with portraits.
*Larrimore, Mark. The Book of Job: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Lives of Great Religious Books. 183-94.
§Lestringant, Frank. “William Blake, clé de Dostoïevski.” André Gide, l'inquiéteur. 2 vols. [Paris]: Flammarion, 2011, 2012. In French.
Lister, Raymond
The archive of Raymond Lister, painter, collector, Blake scholar, editor of Samuel Palmer’s letters, was given to the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge University), which published an online catalogue of it (seen 2013).
Lobanova, V. V. See also under her married name, Vera Serdechnaya.
§Lobanova, V. V. “Kommujnikativnyi kod Svifta i Sterna v satire U. Bleika ‘Ostrov na Lune’ [Communicative Code of Swift and Sterne in W. Blake Satire ‘The Island of the Moon’].” Mir romantizma: materialy mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii “Mir romantizma” (XII Gulyaevskikh chtenii) [The World of Romanticism: Proceedings of the International Conference “World Romanticism” (XII Gulyaevskie readings)]. Ed. E. Mil'ugina. [Tver] 10.34 (2004): 11-16. In Russian.
§*Low, Katherine. “William Blake’s Job.” The Bible, Gender, and Reception History: The Case of Job’s Wife. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 586. Scriptural Traces: Critical Perspectives on the Reception and Influence of the Bible 1. Chapter 5 (135-94).
It includes “Overview of Blake’s Job Engravings” (143-83) and “Job and His Wife in Blake’s Job Series” (184-94). The illustrations include Job pls. “1”-“21”.
§Lubbock, Tom. “Albion Rose.” English Graphic. London: Frances Lincoln Ltd., 2012. 122-25.
Also “Blake Shapes” (110-17) and “Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion” (118-21). There are chapters on Flaxman, Fuseli, Palmer, and Romney.
*Lüdeke, Roger. Zur Schreibkunst von William Blake: Ästhetische Souveränität und politische Imagination. Munich: Fink, 2013. Münchener Studien zur Literaturwissenschaft. 4o, 296 pp., 15 color plates; ISBN: 9783770552467. In German.
Lussier, Mark. “Scientific Objects and Blake’s Objections to Science.” Wordsworth Circle 39.3 (summer 2008): 120-23. <§Blake (2013)>
“Blake was acutely aware of the mediational function of scientific instrumentation and its impact on the imagination ….”
M
*Matthews, Susan. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness. 2011. <§Blake (2012)>
Review
Wayne C. Ripley,
European Romantic Review 24.1 (2013): 108-15 (with another) (a chapter-by-chapter digest; in her “ambitious and important” book, Matthews is “interested in positioning Blake within a series of discursive networks related to bourgeois sexuality,” “occasionally losing Blake in a network of connections that don’t always seem to illuminate Blake’s meaning” [111, 109]).
Mazzeo, Tilar J. “William Blake’s Golden String: Jerusalem and the London Textile Industry.” Studies in Romanticism 52.1 (spring 2013): 115-45.
Jerusalem is “essentially” or at least “in some fundamental way, engaged with the textile trade” (116, 118); the evidence about the trade, chiefly in silk, is fascinating, but details from Jerusalem are sparse.
§McKegg, Bro. William H., F.R.C. “William Blake—Painter, Poet and Mystic.” Rosicrucian Digest (May 1932). B. *Rosicrucian Beacon 19.4 (Sept. 2010): 9-12.
A biography; Blake was “a Rosicrucian adept,” but McKegg offers no evidence.
Mendoza Serrano, Carolina. “El tigre como lo exótico: Un estudio sobre la metáfora del tigre en ‘Songs of innocence and of experience’ de William Blake y ‘El oro de los tigres’ de Jorge Luis Borges.” Cartaphilus: Revista de Investigación y Crítica Estética 1 (2007): 80-87. In Spanish.
§Mezquita Fernández, María Antonia. “Dos poetas visionarios: William Blake y Claudio Rodríguez.” Anuario del Instituto de Estudios Zamoranos Florián de Ocampo no. 22 (2005): 399-408. In Spanish.
Michéa, C.-F. [Claude-François]. Du délire des sensations. 2nd ed. Paris: Labé, 1851. 75-76. In French.
He gives the story about Blake’s visionary head of William Wallace from Louise Belloc, “Extrait de la vie de Blake Revue encyclopédiq. 1830, tom. xlvi, p. 666” (xxii).
Milosz, Czeslaw. “Blake and Swedenborg.” Philosophy, Literature, Mysticism: An Anthology of Essays on the Thought and Influence of Emanuel Swedenborg. Ed. Stephen McNeilly. London: Swedenborg Society, 2013.
Note also Keri Davies, “‘The Swedishman at Brother Brockmer’s’: Moravians and Swedenborgians in Eighteenth-Century London” and H. J. Jackson, “‘Swedenborg’s Meaning is the truth’: Coleridge, Tulk and Swedenborg.”
§Miner, Paul. “Blake: Musings and Counter-Musings.” Notes and Queries 60.2 (June 2013): 218-22.
§Miner, Paul. “William Blake’s Creative Scripture.” Literature and Theology 27.1 (March 2013): 32-47.
Miyamachi, Seiichi. “Honyaku Nicholas Marsh, William Blake: The Poems [Translation of Chapter Two, Nicholas Marsh, William Blake: The Poems].” Sapporo Gakuin Daigaku Jimbun Gakkai Kiyo (Journal of the Society of Humanities, Sapporo Gakuin University) no. 92 (2012): 119-68. In Japanese.
Morimatsu, Kensuke. Kinsei Igirisu Bungaku to Shizen: Shakespeare kara Blake made (Nature in British Literature: From Shakespeare to Blake). Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku Shuppanbu, 2010. In Japanese.
Review
Tomoya Oda,
Igirisu Romanha Kenkyu (
Essays in English Romanticism) no. 36 (2012): 88-91. In Japanese.
§Mounic, Anne. “William Blake, du tigre à l’infini.” L’Esprit du récit ou la chair du devenir: Éthique et création littéraire. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013. Bibliothèque de littérature générale et comparée 112. In French.
Muhammad, Sardar. “Man or Muse: Affinities in the Inspirational Roles of Rumi’s Shams and Blake’s Milton.” Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 20.1 (June 2012): 99.
About Jalal-ud-din Rumi’s Shams and Blake’s Milton.
*Mulhallen, Karen, ed. Blake in Our Time: Essays in Honour of G. E. Bentley Jr. 2010. <Blake (2011)>
Review
Wayne C. Ripley,
European Romantic Review 24.1 (2013): 108-15 (with another) (a chapter-by-chapter digest. “
Blake in Our Time pays fitting tribute to the Blake scholar and bibliographer G. E. Bentley with a host of carefully researched articles rooted firmly in the type of concrete bibliographical and historical facts that are the hallmark of Bentley’s erudite and meticulous scholarship. … Almost every essay of
Blake in Our Time builds on facts originally discovered or insights first posited by Bentley himself” [109]. Mary Lynn Johnson’s essay on Blake and Butts “most deserves to be listened to” [110]. The review also covers the podcasts of the 2010 symposium that launched
Blake in Our Time [109]).
Mulvihill, James. “A Voice without Form: Blake’s Book of Ahania and Song of Solomon.” English Studies 88.5 (2007): 522-30. <§Blake (2013)>
“Ahania’s lament exhibits a mannered eroticism tracing its provenance to Song of Solomon” (523).
N
Nagashima, Kazuhiko. “Blake no Tiriel ni okeru Muku to Keiken: Tairitsu to Hitei tono Kanren ni oite (Innocence and Experience in Blake’s Tiriel, in Relation to Contraries and Negations).” Kawamura Eibungaku no. 18 (2013): 1-16. In Japanese.
O
§Osińska, Agnieszka. “The Religious and Mythological Symbolism in the Writings of William Blake and Juliusz Słowacki.” Wrocław [Poland] PhD, 2013.
*Otto, Peter. Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in The Four Zoas. 2000. <Blake (2002)>
Review
Keri Davies,
Studies in Romanticism 43.3 (fall 2004): 492-97.
P
*Paley, Morton D. “William Blake’s ‘Portable Fresco.’” European Romantic Review 24.3 (2013): 271-77.
A description of what Blake meant by “fresco.”
*Parray, Ashaq Hussain. “Songs of Innocence and [of] Experience: A Trans-historical Humanitarian Discourse.” Language in India 13.7 (July 2013): 136-41.
General reflections on Blake.
*Parrish, Susan Scott. “Embodying African Knowledge in Colonial Surinam: Two William Blake Engravings in Stedman’s 1796 Narrative.” Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World. Ed. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Chapter 9 (257-81).
The two prints are of “A Private Marine of Col. Fourgeoud’s Corps” and “The Celebrated Gramman Quacy.” Blake is fairly incidental to the essay; the designs are by Stedman, after all.
§Pullman, P. “The Week in Books: The Inexhaustible Blake.” Guardian [London] 26 Nov. 2011.
§Pyle, Eric Allan. “William Blake’s Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy.” Hiroshima Daigaku (Hiroshima University) PhD, 2012.
An abstract was published in Hiroshima Daigaku Daigakuin Sogokagaku Kenkyuka Kiyo I, Ningen Kagaku Kenkyu (Studies in Human Sciences, Bulletin of Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences I, Hiroshima University) no. 7 (2012): 85-86.
Q
Quinney, Laura. William Blake on Self and Soul. 2009. <Blake (§2010, 2011)>
Review
§S. Sklar,
Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 30.2 (2012): 247.
R
Radiatus. “The Gnostic Element of Distance in Blake.” Voidlight: The Mystery of Gnosis in Distance. [N.p.: n.p.], 2010. Chapter 9 (73-81).
Raebeck, Barry. Tyger on the Crooked Road: William Blake, Poet, Painter, Prophet. Bloomington: iUniverse LLC, 2013. 8o, viii, 355 pp.; ISBN: 9781475990775.
It is “a novel of historical fiction based on Blake’s life” (vii).
*Raine, Kathleen. Golgonooza City of Imagination: Last Studies in William Blake. 1991. <BBS p. 614> B. *Ocho ensayos sobre William Blake. Trans. Carla Carmona. Vilaür [Gerona]: Atalanta, 2013. Colección Imaginatio vera 76. 8o, 273 pp.; ISBN: 9788494094132. In Spanish.
The Spanish edition contains “Introducción” (11-19), “La ciencia y la imaginación en William Blake” (21-47), “Blake y Maya” (49-71), “La mitologización del tiempo en los libros proféticos de Blake” (73-105), “Blake, Swedenborg y lo Divino Humano” (107-38), “La ciudad en la poesía profética de Blake” (139-66), “El sufrimiento según las ilustraciones de Blake del Libro de Job” (167-217, with black-and-white reproductions of the title page and pls. 1-21 of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job), “El Apocalipsis: Blake y Miguel Ángel” (219-40), “El sueño de Albion” (241-63), “Index” (264-69).
Review
*Iván Pintor Iranzo (see
Libros proféticos I in Part I, Section B).
Roberts, Jonathan. Blake. Wordsworth. Religion. 2010. <Blake (§2011, 2012)>
Review
Bruce Graver (see
Blake 47.3, above).
§Roberts, Jonathan. “St. Paul’s Gifts to Blake’s Aesthetic.” Glass 15 (2003): 8-18. <Blake (§2008)> B. §Visions and Revisions. Ed. R. Kojecký and A. Tate. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.
*Rowland, Christopher. Blake and the Bible. 2011. <Blake (2012)>
Reviews
§Nicholas King,
Scripture Bulletin 41.2 (2011): 89-91.
*Linda Freedman (see
Blake 47.1, above).
§Wayne C. Ripley,
Christianity and Literature 62.3 (2013): 455-58.
§Rowland, Christopher. “‘Mr. Blake, apo- or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter’: Apocalyptic Hermeneutics in Action.” Die Johannesapokalypse: Kontext—Konzepte—Rezeption. Ed. Jörg Frey, James A. Kelhoffer, and Franz Tóth. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012.
S
Sato, Hikari. “1900 Nendai no Blake Aikoka no Keifu: Bernard Leach, Augustus John, John Sampson (The Genealogy of Blake Enthusiasts in the 1900s: Bernard Leach, Augustus John, and John Sampson).” Choiki Bunka Kagaku Kiyo (Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies) no. 18 (2013): 33-53. In Japanese, with English synopsis.
It is highly conceivable that the enthusiasm for Blake was transmitted from Sampson to John and from John to Leach, who also shared interests in Bohemianism.
Sato, Hikari. “William Blake Shoden [A Short Introduction to the Life of William Blake].” Shikai [Bulletin of Japan Poets Club] no. 260 (2013): 30-40. In Japanese.
Sato, Hikari. “William Blake to Yanagi Muneyoshi [William Blake and Yanagi Muneyoshi].” Shikai Tsushin [Report of Japan Poets Club] no. 59 (2012): 9-11. In Japanese.
Sato, Hikari. “Yanagi Muneyoshi ni okeru ‘Temperament’: William Blake (1914) no Kiteion (The Use of the Word ‘Temperament’ by Yanagi Muneyoshi: The Basal Tone of William Blake [1914]).” Hikaku Bungaku (Journal of Comparative Literature) no. 55 (2013): 22-35. In Japanese, with English synopsis.
Sato, Hikari. “Yanagi Muneyoshi William Blake: Hanko no Seishin to Kosei no Soncho [William Blake by Yanagi Muneyoshi: The Rebellious Spirit and the Respect of Individuality].” Igirisu Romanha Kenkyu (Essays in English Romanticism) no. 37 (2013): 109-14. In Japanese.
Sedgwick, Marcus, Julian Sedgwick, John Higgins, and Marc Olivent. Dark Satanic Mills. London: Walker Books Ltd., 2013. 4o, 172 pp.; ISBN: 9781406329889. A graphic novel.
All of “Jerusalem” from Milton is printed on the fold-out title page, and there is a note “On William Blake and Other Influences” ([170-71]).
Serdechnaya, Vera. See also under her maiden name, V. V. Lobanova.
§Serdechnaya, V. V. “Dialektika didaktiki: ‘Brakosochetanie Nebes i Ada’ Uil'yama Bleika [Dialectics of Didactics: ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ by William Blake].” Didaktika khudozhestvennogo teksta: Sb. nauch. statei [Didactics of Literary Text: Collection of Scientific Articles]. Ed. A. Tatarinov. Krasnodar, 2005. 44-53. In Russian.
§Serdechnaya, V. V. “Genre of Small Poem in the Works of William Blake and the English Romantics: Narrative Strategies: Zhanr maloi poemy v tvorchestve U. Bleika i romantikov Anglii: narrativnye strategii.” Yazyk Slovesnost' Kul'tura: Language. Philology. Culture no. 2 (2011): 104-25. In Russian.
§Serdechnaya, V. V. “Glupyi belyi chelovek, ili Kto umiraet v ‘Mertvetse’ Dzharmusha? [Stupid White Man, or Who Dies in the ‘Dead Man’ of Jarmusch?]” Volshebnaya gora [Moscow] no. 14 (2007): 534-53. In Russian.
Reprinted in her Malye poemy Uil'yama Bleika: Povestvovanie, tipologiya, kontekst [Small Poems of William Blake: Narrative, Typology, Context] (see below).
§Serdechnaya, V. V. “‘I must Create a System’ …: K voprosu o tsiklizatsii ‘malykh’ prorocheskikh poem Uil'yama Bleika [‘I must Create a System’ …: On the Cyclization of ‘Small’ Prophetic Poems by William Blake].” Mir romantizma: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii “Mir romantizma” [World of Romanticism: Proceedings of the International Conference “World Romanticism”]. Ed. E. Mil'ugina. 12.36 (2006): 13-17. In Russian.
§Serdechnaya, Vera. Malye poemy Uil'yama Bleika: Povestvovanie, tipologiya, kontekst [Small Poems of William Blake: Narrative, Typology, Context]. St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2012. 4o, 240 pp., 47 reproductions, mostly in color; ISBN: 9785860076822. In Russian.
A contextual analysis and typology of Blake’s Lambeth prophecies. It reprints her “Glupyi belyi chelovek, ili Kto umiraet v ‘Mertvetse’ Dzharmusha? [Stupid White Man, or Who Dies in the ‘Dead Man’ of Jarmusch?]” (see above).
§Serdechnaya, V. V. “Na pirakh Vechnosti: ‘Pesn' Losa’ Uil'yama Bleika [At the Feasts of Eternity: ‘The Song of Los’ by William Blake].” Volshebnaya gora [Moscow] no. 15 (2009): 456-60. In Russian.
§Serdechnaya, Vera. “Narrativnye strategii malykh prorocheskikh poem Uil'yama Bleika: problemy tipologii i svoeobraziya v istoriko-kul'turnom kontekste [The Narrative Strategies of Short Prophetic Poems of William Blake (The Problems of Typology and Identity in Historical and Cultural Context)].” Voronezh State University [Russia] PhD, 2006. In Russian.
§Serdechnaya, V. V. “Narrativnye strategii vetkhozavetnykh prorochestv v poemakh Uil'yama Bleika [Narrative Strategy of the Old Testament Prophecies in the Poems of William Blake].” Khudozhestvennaya literatura i religioznye formy soznaniya materialy Mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi Internet-konferentsii [Fiction and Religious Forms of Consciousness: Proceedings of the International Online Scientific Conference]. Ed. G. Isaev and I. Motygin. Astrakhan, 2006. 41-45. In Russian.
§Serdechnaya, V. V. “Poet voobrazheniya [The Poet of Imagination].” Pedagogichekii vestnik Kubani no. 2 (2005). 50 pp.
The poet is Blake.
§Serdechnaya, V. V. “Small (Lambeth) Poems by William Blake: The Question of Classification: Malye (lambetskie) poemy Uil'yama Bleika: k voprosu klassifikatsii.” Yazyk Slovesnost' Kul'tura: Language. Philology. Culture no. 1 (2011): 115-25. In Russian.
§Serdechnaya, V. V. “Syuzhetika tsikla prorocheskikh poem Uil'yama Bleika: istoriko-mitologicheskii kontekst [Plot Structure of the Prophetic Cycle of Poems by William Blake: The Historical and Mythological Context].” Aktual'nye problemy sovremennogo yazykoznaniya i literaturovedeniya: Materialy 4-oi mezhvuzovskoi konferentsii molodykh ucheniykh [Actual Problems of Modern Linguistics and Literary Studies: Proceedings of the Fourth Inter-university Conference of Young Scientists]. Ed. V. Abramov et al. Krasnodar, 2005. 318-24. In Russian.
*Sklar, Susanne M. Blake’s Jerusalem as Visionary Theatre: Entering the Divine Body. 2011. <Blake (2012)>
Reviews
Stephen Prickett, “Holy Bricolage,”
Times Literary Supplement 22 March 2013: 24 (“Sklar’s scholarship is … monumental”).
R. Paul Yoder (see
Blake 47.2, above).
§Sotuela Elorriaga, Lur. “William Blake: el ‘misticismo’ de un poeta maldito.” Pasos de arte y cultura no. 7 (2008): 96-97. In Spanish.
Steck, Christopher. “Re-embedding Moral Agency: Linking Theology and Ethics in Blake.” Journal of Religious Ethics 41.2 (June 2013): 332-53.
In “Blake, Theology, and Ethics” (342-50), Jerusalem is used as a test of his theory about “the connection between ethics and theological vision.”
§Stevens, Matt. “The Evolution of William Blake’s Genesis.” Huntington Frontiers 8.1 (spring-summer 2012): 22-23.
About the Crosby–Essick edition of Blake’s Genesis transcript.
Suzuki, Masashi. “Kenbikyo teki Sozoryoku no Keifu (2): Sir Joshua Reynolds kara William Blake e [The Genealogy of Microscopic Imagination (2): From Sir Joshua Reynolds to William Blake].” Eibun Gakkaishi [Journal of the English Literary Society] no. 41 (2012): 3-28. In Japanese.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Ed. Terry L. Meyers. Vol. 1 1848-1874 [Vol. 2 1875-1889] [Vol. 3 1890-1909]. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005.
There are occasional references to Blake, chiefly to Swinburne’s own book (1868). Of these, the most important are Swinburne’s letter of 13 Oct. 1864 about Tiriel (see Tiriel in Part I, Section A) and the letter from Francis Cunningham (the son of Allan Cunningham, Blake’s biographer) to Swinburne (3 Nov. 1866), enclosing an
in your book (1: 81-82). Etty’s letter of 25 March 1830 (not with Cunningham’s) about Lawrence’s gift of £100 to Blake is given in
BR(2) 525; it was first recorded by Robert N. Essick, “William Blake and Sir Thomas Lawrence,”
Notes and Queries 223 (1978): 211-13.
In the same letter, Cunningham says that he owns the drawings by Blake, Rossetti catalogue [1863] 242, nos. 22-23, the “Last Judgment” and a tracing of it (1: 82). Rossetti no. 22 is The Last Judgment <Butlin #644>, sold by Tatham, Sotheby’s, 29 April 1862, lot 179, to Palser; Alfred Aspland owned it by 1876 and sold it at Sotheby’s, 27 Jan. 1885, lot 64. Rossetti no. 23 is The Last Judgment—Tracing <#646>, sold with Rossetti no. 22 in the 1862 sale, lot 179, to Palser, and owned by Mrs. Gilchrist in 1880.
The only Francis Cunningham recorded by Butlin is a Lt. Col. who owned Butlin #111 and 506.
T
§Tavares, Enéias Farias. “‘As Portas da Percepção’: Texto e Imagem nos Livros Iluminados de William Blake.” Universidade Federal de Santa Maria [Brazil] PhD, 2012. In Portuguese.
*Tayler, Irene. Blake’s Illustrations to the Poems of Gray. 1971. 118 reproductions much reduced in size, all but one in monochrome. <BB #2824> B. *Ed. with a new foreword by Martin Butlin. London: Folio Society, 2013. 15.6 x 27.8 cm., xiv, 210 pp., one reduced monochrome illustration; no ISBN. Published to accompany the Folio Society facsimile (2013).
In his “Foreword” (vii-x), Butlin says that he has altered the references to Blake’s writings from the edition of Geoffrey Keynes to that of David V. Erdman, and the references to contemporary texts to G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records, 2nd ed. (2004), that he has given more accessible references to reproductions of Blake’s art than in the 1971 edition, and that he has added footnotes signed “M.B.,” a “List of Works Cited” (203-05), and “Supplementary Bibliography” (206-07). “Irene Tayler’s text is still the most satisfactory introduction to the subtleties of Blake’s illustrations to the poems of Gray” (ix).
§Tayson, Richard. “Ghostly Language and Liminal Experience: William Blake, Romantic Discourse on the Sublime, and American Punk Sound.” City University of New York PhD, 2012.
§Tholoniat, Yann. “William Blake, Songs of Innocence and [of] Experience.” Guide de la littérature britannique. Ed. Jean Pouvelle and Jean-Pierre Demarche. Paris: Ellipses, 2008. 111-14.
*Thompson, Michael. “William Blake and the Illustrations for Blair’s Grave Part One.” Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies 27.2 (fall 2013): 18-22, 24.
A curiously inaccurate account with no indication of the sources of its information.
Tsuchiya, Shigeko. Kotoba to Vision: Blake kara Beckett made [Language and Vision: From Blake to Beckett]. Hachioji: Chuo Daigaku Shuppanbu, 2012. 329 pp.; ISBN: 9784805751749. In Japanese. <§Blake (2013)>
Part 1 consists of eight essays on Blake:
[1]. “Ai no Himitsu ko [On ‘Love’s Secret’].” 3-9.
[2]. “Mushin to Keiken no Kozu [The Structure of Innocence and Experience].” 10-32.
[3]. “Keiken no Uta Saiko [
Songs of Experience Revisited].” 33-39.
[4]. “Blake to Fukugo Geijutsu [Blake and Composite Art].” 40-53.
[5]. “Tengoku to Jigoku no Kekkon [
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell].” 54-63.
[6]. “Blake no Milton: Seisei suru Vision [Blake’s
Milton: The Generated Vision].” 64-82.
[7]. “Erusaremu [
Jerusalem].” 83-105.
[8]. “Blake no Yobuki [Blake’s Book of Job].” 106-20.
§Tweedy, Roderick. The God of the Left Hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and the Myth of Creation. London: Karnac Books, 2012. 353 pp.; ISBN: 9781780491011.
“Blake’s profound understanding of the human brain is finding surprising corroboration in recent neuroscientific discoveries, such as those of the … neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor.” The book deals extensively with Urizen.
U
§Ury-Petesch, Jean-Philippe, ed. L’intertextualité lyrique: recyclages littéraires et cinématographiques opérés par la chanson. 2010. In French.
It contains the essay “Dog Is Life/Jerusalem, entre chant mythique et détournement ironique: William Blake repris et détourné par The Fall.”
V
§*Vaughan, William. William Blake. 1999. <§Blake (2000)> C. §London: Tate Publishing, 2013. 96 pp.; ISBN: 9781849761901.
§Vine, Steven. “William Blake’s Materialities.” Reinventing the Sublime: Post-Romantic Literature and Theory. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2013.
W
§Watson, Ben. Blake in Cambridge: or “The Opposite of David Willetts.” London: Unkant Publishers, 2012. 21 cm., xiv, 132 pp.; ISBN: 9780956817686.
Blake in the Wedgwood Museum (Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent)
Manuscript Catalogue
Date | Subject | Box | Documents |
1815 | South Molton St—Engravings for Catalogue | 6 | 4382-83See Letters in Part I, Section A. |
1815 | Catalogue | 47 | 29318 |
§Whitfield, Peter. “William Blake.” Illustrating Shakespeare. London: British Library, 2013. 46-47.
§Whitmarsh-Knight, David. “William Blake’s ‘The Four Zoas’ Explained.” <§Blake (2008)> B. Shakespeare’s Heir: Blake’s Doors of Perception in Jerusalem and The Four Zoas. Cambridge: William Blake Press, 2010. 378 pp.; ISBN: 9781448685806.
§Whitson, Roger, and Jason Whittaker. William Blake and the Digital Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media. New York: Routledge, 2013. xi, 211 pp.; ISBN: 9780415656184.
*Wilson, Sarah. “Enluminures: représentations de William Blake.” La Revue de la BNU [Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg] no. 4 (autumn 2011): 30-41. In French.
Y
§Yates, Mark. “Allegory and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century: The Frontispiece to William Blake’s ‘There is No Natural Religion.’” Proceedings of the Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC) 2011. Salford: University of Salford, 2012. 7-16.
Yates, Mark. “Notes on William Blake’s Paper Makers, c. 1789-1795.” ANQ 26.3 (Sept. 2013): 169-79.
A useful summary of the findings of other scholars.
Z
§Zhan, Changjuan. “William Blake and His Poem ‘London.’” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 3.9 (Sept. 2013): 1610-14.
Division II: Blake’s Circle
Boydell, John (1719–1804)
Print publisher
§Dias, Rosie. Exhibiting Englishness: John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the Formation of a National Aesthetic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. viii, 274 pp.
§Whitfield, Peter. “The Boydell Experiment.” Illustrating Shakespeare. London: British Library, 2013. 48-53.
Cumberland, George (1754–1848)
Polymath, artist, friend of Blake
The Emigrants or A Trip to the Ohio, a Theatrical Farce (1817): A Comedic Portrayal of English Emigrants Who Never Get to America.The title page was invented by the publisher. Ed. with an introduction and notes by Elizabeth B. Bentley. With a preface by Angus Whitehead. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013. 8o, [12], i-xvi, 190 pp.; ISBN: 9780773440883.
The work consists of Angus Whitehead, “Preface” (v-xvi), “Introduction: George Cumberland, a Polymath” (1-15), text of The Emigrants (17-87) with endnotes (89-94), reproductions (poor) of the manuscript of the farce [in the E. J. Pratt Library of Victoria University in the University of Toronto] (95-148), “Characters in the Dramatis Personae” (149-69) with “The Date of the Farce” (157), “Notes on the Manuscript” (157-69), and bibliography (171-75).
An Essay on the Utility of Collecting the Best Works of the Ancient Engravers of the Italian School; Accompanied by a Critical Catalogue, … of Rare and Valuable Prints … Now Deposited in the British Museum and Royal Academy, in London (1827)
According to the online catalogue of the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings, most of Cumberland’s print collection in the Royal Academy was sold in the 1950s.
A Poem on the Landscapes of Great-Britain … with Etchings by the Author (1793)
The copy in the Yale Center for British Art is, according to the catalogue, “extra-illustrated; probably by the author, for a proposed illustrated edition.”
G. Cumberland, Esq. “Sketch of the Strata of the Vicinity of Bristol, Presented to the Author of This Tract, as a Guide to Collectors.” Rev. John Evans. The New Guide, or Picture of Bristol, with the Beauties of Clifton: A Descriptive Arrangement of Excursions in Their Vicinities, and an Appendix on Their Geology, Botany, &c. &c. Illustrated with a Plan of the City, a Map, &c. 4th ed. Bristol: Aitkens, Clifton …, 1828. 51-55.
Flaxman, John (1755–1826)
Sculptor, friend of Blake
2010 27 July–29 October
Annette Wickham.
The Language of Line: John Flaxman’s Illustrations to the Works of Homer and Aeschylus. London: Royal Academy, 2010. 23 cm., 12 pp.
2013 13 February–21 April
[David Bindman].
John Flaxman: Line to Contour. Birmingham: Ikon, [2013]. 4
o, 112 pp.; ISBN: 9781904864813.
Catalogue of an exhibition at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
David Bindman. “Life into Contour: Flaxman’s Drawings in Practice and Theory.” 9-16.
David Bindman. “The Consolation of the Afterlife: Flaxman’s Church Monuments.” 75-78.
David Bindman. “Flaxman and UCL.” 103-05.
Flaxman in the Wedgwood Museum (Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent)
Manuscript Catalogue
under Flaxman, John
Date | Subject | Box | Documents |
1775-1816 | Bills for Models, Monument to J. W., &c. | 1 | 204-25 |
1781-1876 | Bills for Models, Sale of His Works, &c. | 2 | 1330-46 |
1786-87 | Seals for Due [?Duc] de Bouillon, Box of Books & Clothing | 1 | 26272-73 |
1781-90 | Bills for Models | 2 | 30186-97 |
under Flaxman, WilliamFlaxman’s brother William (?1753-?95) exhibited models in wood and wax.
1786-1802 | Bills for Frames & Medals | 17 | 3267-72 |
1785 | Bill for Frames | 2 | 30198 |
OMHPOΥ EΠH. | — | HOMERI ET HOMERIDARUM | OPERA ET RELIQUIAE. | EX RECENSIONE | FRID. AUG. WOLFII. | — | NOVA RECOGNITIO. | MULTIS LOCIS EMENDATIOR. | VOL. I[-II]. | — | IN USUM SCHOLARUM. | — | LIPSIAE, | APUD BIBLIOPOLAM G. I. GÖSCHEN. 1817 <Victoria University in the University of Toronto>In the Victoria University copy, there are many learned pencil notes and a couple of small portraits, and the imposition of vol. 1, pp. 130-50, has gone wonderfully astray.
Text in Greek; leaf size 12.0 x 17.4 cm.; plate sizes vary. The prints are apparently from the plates for Flaxman’s Umrisse zu Homers Iliade (Leipzig: G. J. Göschen, 1804), signed with various forms of “Ludov. Schnorr v K. del” and “V.H. Schnorr v K acquafort. fec[it].”
The 1817 work is not mentioned in G. E. Bentley, Jr., The Early Engravings of Flaxman’s Classical Designs: A Bibliographical Study (New York: New York Public Library, 1964).
Symmons, Sarah. “John Flaxman and Francisco Goya: Infernos Transcribed.” Burlington Magazine 113.822 (Sept. 1971): 506, 508-12. <§Blake (2013)>
Sometimes Goya copied Flaxman “with astonishingly careful precision.”
Fuseli, Henry (1741–1825)
Swiss-born painter
“The Night Mare,” “Painted by H. Fusley,” “Engraved by A. Zaffanato,” “Publish’d November 30tḥ 1795 by A. Suntach” [no address].
The design is reversed, with the horse at the right and the incubus at the left.
§Dias, Rosie. “‘The Shakespeare of the canvas’: Fuseli and the Construction of English Artistic Genius.” Exhibiting Englishness: John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the Formation of a National Aesthetic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Padilla, Nathalie. L’esthétique du sublime dans les peintures shakespeariennes d’Henry Füssli (1741-1825). Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009. 4o, 428 pp., with 14 murky black-and-white reproductions; ISBN: 9782296066540. In French.
§Pop, Andrei. “Henry Fuseli: Greek Tragedy and Cultural Pluralism.” Art Bulletin 94.1 (March 2012): 78-98.
§Whitfield, Peter. “Henry Fuseli.” Illustrating Shakespeare. London: British Library, 2013. 42-45.
Hayley, William (1745–1820)
Man of letters and patron
Anon. “City Poet Being Reclaimed by University.” Chichester Observer 8 April 2013.
A plaque to Hayley was unveiled at his Eartham House.
§Barsham, Diana, ed. William Hayley (1745-1820): England’s Lost Laureate—Selected Poetry. Chichester: University of Chichester Press, 2013. 96 pp.; ISBN: 9781907852206.
§Foster, Paul, ed. William Hayley (1745-1820)—Poet Biographer and Libertarian: A Reassessment. Chichester: University of Chichester Press, 2013.
Essays by Diana Barsham, Anthony Cane, Tracey Carr, Janet Carter, Mark Crosby, Paul Foster, Lisa Gee, “William Hayley and the Culture of Sensibility,” Susan Matthews, Suzanne E. May, “The Jupiter of Sussex: William Hayley and His Portraits,” and John Wyatt.
Linnell, John (1792–1882)
Painter, Blake’s patron
The E. J. Pratt Library of Victoria University in the University of Toronto acquired in 2013 a newly discovered pretty little metal box (17.5 x 11.3 cm.) shaped like a book, with gilt edges, clasps, and decorated covers, the spine of tooled leather. The front cover has an octagonal mother-of-pearl surface decorated with flowers (some rust stains). The front and back inner boards are white watered silk with gilt dentelles with a white watered-silk pull.
Inside the box is a white watered-silk folder containing six leaves (the last two from a larger leaf folded in two) gilt on all four edges, watermarked “J Wh | 18” on the folded leaf and “& Son | 0” on leaf 4.
6. Exterior and interior of a metal box (17.5 x 11.3 cm.) shaped like a book, with gilt edges, clasps, and decorated covers, the front cover of mother-of-pearl decorated with flowers, the spine of tooled leather. Victoria University in the University of Toronto.
Inside the box is a portrait by John Linnell of Robert Gooch, a sketch of Bedgellert by John Varley, a description by Gooch of “A Dream” about a skeleton, and an account by Gooch of going round the wards of the hospital at Yarmouth with Nelson after the Battle of Copenhagen.
The leaves include:
1. A sketch inscribed in pencil at the bottom “This shall be improved another time” and, on the verso in ink:
2. A very simple sketch of a bridge called “Bedgellert | an account of a Dream connected with the above view will be given at another period | J. Varley.”
3. On the double leaf is written:
Mathew, Anthony Stephen (1733–1824)
Clergyman and patron of Blake
The “last Will and Testament of me Anthony Stephen Mathew of Ruſsell place in the parish of St. pancras in the County of Middlesex Clerk”“Clerk” is made explicit in the marginal note: “The Revd Anthony Stephen Mathew”. was written on 28 January 1818, with codicils of 23 February 1819 and 14 December 1822, and proved on 22 November 1824. In it he
“& after his
decease to his wife Dorothea.”Prerogative Court of Canterbury, PROB 11/1692/230, in the National Archives. Note that the hand that transcribed the wills gives “e” for “&”; I have substituted “&” for this “e”. William Henry Mathew (born 1769) was a surgeon. The lack of reference to A. S. Mathew’s wife, Harriet, suggests that she had died before 28 January 1818.
These fifteen houses plus a “workshop yard” suggest considerable prosperity. There is no indication as to whether his “books paintings” included any by his sometime protégé William Blake. None has ever been traced to him, not even the Poetical Sketches (1783), the printing of which Anthony Stephen Mathew partly paid for.
Palmer, Samuel (1805–81)
Painter and disciple
2005 21 October–2006 22 January; 7 March–29 May
Vaughan, William, et al.
Samuel Palmer 1805-1881: Vision and Landscape. 2005. <
Blake (2006)>
Review
Roberta Smith, “
A Tree-Hugger ahead of His Time,”
New York Times 17 March 2006.
Harrison, Colin. “Samuel Palmer and the Pastoral Vision.” Architectural Design 83.3 (May 2013): 20-25.
On Blake’s influence on Palmer.
§Payne, Christiana. “‘A mild, a grateful, an unearthly lustre’: Samuel Palmer and the Moon.” Burlington Magazine 154, no. 1310 (May 2012): 330-36.
It includes references to Blake.
§Shaw-Miller, Simon, and Sam Smiles, eds. Samuel Palmer Revisited. 2010. <§Blake (2011)>
Review
§Elizabeth E. Barker,
Print Quarterly 29.1 (March 2012): 92-95.
Smith, John Thomas (1766–1833)
Artist, early friend of Blake
Smith’s collection of sale catalogues was bought by Fritz LugtJ. F. Heijbroek, Frits Lugt 1884-1970: Living for Art: A Biography, [trans. Lynne Richards] (Bussum [Netherlands]: Thoth Publishers; Paris: Fondation Custodia, 2012) 253. Lugt’s great Répertoire des Catalogues de Ventes, which includes the Smith catalogues, is available online. and is now in his Fondation Custodia in Paris.
Stothard, Thomas (1755–1834)
Painter, early friend of Blake
The Decameron or Ten Days’ Entertainment of Boccaccio with Introduction by Thomas Wright, M.A., F.S.A. with Portrait after Raffaelle, and Ten Designs by T. Stothard. London: Chatto and Windus, [1876]. <Victoria University in the University of Toronto>
The Stothard plates are from the Pickering edition (n.d. given).
Tulk, Charles Augustus (1786–1849)
Swedenborgian and politician
Tulk Album of Drawings
Description:The details here derive from Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2012,” Blake 46.4 (spring 2013), and from the Libson catalogue (see 2013 [January] in Part IV). The album contained 90 pp.; old master drawings, drawings by Flaxman, and two leaves with drawings by Blake.
One of the Blake drawings is a watercolor of an aged couple at the left embracing a boy and a girlLibson calls it The Meeting of a Family in Heaven, the title of a design (1805) for Blair’s Grave (1808), but the two designs are dissimilar, and Essick points out that the setting is distinctly terrestrial. The leaf in the album to which the drawing was attached was inscribed in pencil “Parents meeting” (Essick). It is based on a drawing (1790-92) in Blake’s Notebook, p. 41 (as Essick points out). in front of gothic columns, with a very rough pencil sketch on the verso called by Lowell Libson Sisyphus Rolling the Stone Up a Hill.
The other Blake leaf is of a seated middle-aged couple playing harps.Libson relates them to the harpers in Job (1826) pl. “21”; on the composition, see also Robert N. Essick, “Blake in the Marketplace, 2012,” Blake 46.4 (spring 2013): illus. 9, and Martin Butlin, “Harpers and Other Drawings: The Case for a Unified Composition,” Blake 47.2 (fall 2013). To their left is a naked young man leaning on a shovel who is “almost identical” to the grave-digger on the general title page for his watercolors (1795-97) for Young, Night Thoughts <Butlin #330 2> (as Essick points out), and above them are two floating figuresThey are similar to the flying angels at the top of the title page of Night I <Butlin #330 6> of Night Thoughts, as Essick points out. who seem to be pouring out something. On the verso is a series of disparate studies (reversed) for America (1793) and Europe (1794).
Sizes: The album mounts are 27 x 22 cm.; Blake’s drawings are 9.2 x 14.3 cm. (the aged couple) and 24.6 x 20.4 cm. (the harp players).
Watermark: Whatman paper mounts in the album.
Binding: Bound in calf.
History: See the provenance in Robert N. Essick, “
Blake in the Marketplace, 2012,”
Blake 46.4 (spring 2013): illus. 12.