A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF
day, the dealers held him in thrall, and injured his
reputation by employing others to copy his works.
He was also compelled by necessity to make, for
these patrons, copies of the works of Dutch painters,
in which he was sometimes so successful as to
enable his employers to mislead their customers.
Little of his history is known. He exhibited
' Views of Dunford, near Salisbury,' more than
once at the Academy; and ' Dead Game' frequently
with the Society of British Artists, of which he
was a foundation member. He died about the
year 1830.
BLAKE, Nicholas, a draughtsman and engraver, who illustrated Hanway's ' Travels in Russia and Persia,' published in 1763, an edition of 'Pope's Poems,' and other works. He was a native of Ireland, and lived for many years in Paris, where it is believed he died at the end of the last century.
BLAKE, William, painter and engraver, was born in London on the '28th of November, 1757. (The " good JIS. authority "on which Mr. Swinburne prefers the 20th of November is insufficient to dis- credit the evidence, especially that of Varley's horoscope, for the later date.) He was the second son of a hosier who had carried on business for many years at 28, Broad St., Golden Sijuare, a quarter occupied at that time by shops and residences of a good class. Little is known of his parents' temperaments and acquirements ; but the fact of their sending the lad, in his tenth year, to Pars' drawing academy in the Strand (considered the best drawing-school of the day), is evidence that they lacked neither the will nor the means to launch their son upon an artistic career. The boy had already shown his bent by drawing many curious sketches on the hosier's bills and counters. At fourteen he was taken to be apprenticed to the fashionable engraver Ryland ; but his strong pre- sentiment that Ryland would some day be hanged (a presentiment eventually justified to the letter) led to the breaking off of the negotiations, and it was as a pupil of James Basire, an engraver of the hard and dry school, that Blake spent the years 1771-8. For the understanding of his art it is important to remember that, at an age when the majority of students have hardly entered upontheir more serious training, Blake had already begun to draw and engrave for publication ; for example, ' Joseph of Ariniathea among the Rocks of Al bion,' an engraving put forward as a copy from Michael Angelo, was almost certainly Blake's own design, and it is dated 1773. Nor was the isolation in which this precocious activity was exercised a mere matter of a lonely studio or workshop. Basire employed his apprentice to make drawings of London churches, and it is on record that young Blake was often locked up in Westminster Abbey with no companions save the monarchs and heroes whose crumblii;g effigies he had been sent to copy. There is ground for the supposition that he was present on the day when the body of the first Edward was exhumed and the royal face for a moment uncovered. But, be this as it may, it is certain that the lad's innate sympathy with the supernatural was greatly and perhaps morbidly enhanced by the long hours of loneliness spent in haunted vastness and dimness. At four the boy believed he had seen God " put His forehead to the window," and at eight or ten he had marvelled at a tree bright with angels on Peckham Rye. How far he believed in the objective reality of these appearances cannot be determined. On the one hand stands the fact that to the end of his life ha claimed to be holding converse with the spirits of men no less great than Moses, Homer, Socrates, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton ; affirming, for instance, of Shakespeare, " He is exactly like the old engraving, which is said to be a bad one — I think it very good." On the other hand, full weight must be given to such remarks as, " You can see what I do if you choose. Work up imagination to the state of vision, and the thing is done." Per- haps the best resolution both of this puzzle and of the vexed question of Blake's sanity is the theory that, as an artist, he went as far as do the exponents of materialism in arrogance of idiom, though in an opposite direction. In other words, he did not admit the obligation to confine himself to every- day, literal speech. " All things," he said, "exist in the human imagination alone," and to one who showed him ' The Mechanic's Magazine,' he said, " We artists hate these things." On the termination of his seven years' apprenticeship, Blake studied for a short time at the newly-established Royal Academy. But his preferences and intentions as an artist had already become fixed, as appears from some sentences scribbled by him many years later in a copy of Reynolds' 'Discourses.' It seems that Blake, who, on the strength of threepenny-pieces, invested in prints after such masters as Raphael, Michael Angelo and Diirer, had been known years before in the sale-rooms as " the little connoisseur," " secretly raged " when he was rebuked by Moser, the keeper, for wasting time on these " old, hard, dry, untinislied works " instead of devoting himself to Rubens and Le Brun. As for the living model, he protested that natural objects only "weaken, deaden and obliterate imagination," and declared that the so-called "life" "looks more like death and smells of mortality." But though a revolt from Moser and the Academy was inevitable and bene- ficial, it is a debatable question how far a more prolonged and all-round course of training would have been a loss or a gain to his art. After a dis- appointment in love, Blake married, in 1782, Catherine Boucher, of whom Mr. Swinburne says that she " deserves remembrance as about the most perfect wife on record." At the time of the marriage the young woman could neither read nor write, but she seems in the course of years not only to have vanquished these disabilities, but also to have become no mean draughtswoman, while it is well known that she both bound her husband's books in boards and coloured many of his illustrations. The more painful stories of Blake's poverty are exaggerations, and the accounts of his squalor are falsehoods. But " the last shilling " was a familiar sight. Save for a few years (1800-1804) spent at Felpham in Sussex, in the impossible society of the " poet " Hayley, the couple passed the whole of their lives in London lodgings. Blake never went abroad, and had contact with no artistic life save that of Georgian London. The desire for holidays was a mystery to him, and even the northern heights which are parts of modern London made him ill by their strong and unfamiliar air. He was bred, born, married and buried a Londoner, and this is another of the facts which throw light upon his art, accounting, as it does, both for the lack of variety in proportion to the bulk of his almost innumerable productions, and for the immense force and mystical beauty of the ideal creations which represent the reaction from his cramped and ugly
conditions. In 1780 Blake exhibited ' The Death
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