Patrick Bade
Romantic Visionaries: Blake, Fuseli and Palmer

Patrick Bade | Romantic Visionaries Blake, Fuseli and Palmer | 06.23.21

- Patrick, it’s one minute after half past, so I will hand over to you. And welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us this evening.

• Thank you, Judy. I’m talking today about a group of rather strange and eccentric artists based in Britain in the late 18th, early 19th century. And as you will have gathered from earlier lectures, both from me and from Trudy, this is a very crucial period in the history of the West. You can really say it’s the beginning of the modern world. You have these overlapping revolutions, the American Revolution, French Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and you have these revolutionary movements. You’ve got Enlightenment and Romanticism, and you have, in art you have, Neoclassicism and Romanticism. And they’re movements, which in some ways seem to be opposed, but can also overlap.

And so we’ve got Henry Fuseli or Heinrich Fussli on the left-hand side, and William Blake on the right-hand side. I’ll talk about both of those pictures later. But it’s part of all of this is a new role for the artists. Some of you may have seen a wonderful exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2006 called, “Martyrs and Rebels,” and it was portraits and self-portraits of artists in this period and it showed this changing role of the artist. So this is Henry Fuseli, Heinrich Fussli, who was born in Zurich in 1741, into, of course, a very Protestant family and he studied for the Church. He was going to be a minister. And I think that’s in itself quite significant. That the changed role of the artists now, they don’t see themselves as courtiers or lackies or servants of rich important aristocrats or the court. They see themselves really almost as priests of a new religion. And, oh! Is he really?

You know, he’s up very close. He’s really on top of you, and he’s examining himself in the mirror very, very intently indeed. And so here he is again, Henry Fuseli on the right-hand side. So that’s a self-portrait of about 1780. And the self-portrait on the left is by the French artist, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, who worked for Madame de Pompadour and Louis the 15th, Louis the 16th. And he was actually quite a feisty and assertive guy. But you can see that he is showing himself, he’s showing himself as a courtier. A very much a sort of Ancien Regime figure with a powdered wig and a nice velvet jacket and sort of a lacy shirt and an agreeable smile as opposed to this intense melancholia of Fuseli on the right-hand side. And here’s another. These, actually, these two self-portraits, are almost contemporary.

This is Chardin at the end of his life. So this is 1775. He’s an old man. He’s about 80. And he’s shown himself not aspiring to be a courtier or a gentleman or anything like that, he’s shown himself as a kind of honest, straightforward artisan. It’s also very different from this prophet-like, priest-like image of Fuseli. And here another comparison. This is also around the same time. This is in the 1780s. This is Sir Joshua Reynolds, who at the time was President of the Royal Academy and he showed rather pompous, self-important image as a kind of academic figure. Again, very different from this new image of the artist. This is a generation later, but fully in the spirit of Romanticism. This is the only portrait made by Turner and it’s of himself.

And again, he has a rather visionary look in his glasses. This frontal view, typical of Romantic portraits, and this very intense stare that seems to be looking straight through you. And another artist who I have talked about briefly in the context of Neoclassicism, this is the Irish artist, James Barry, and this dates from 1785 to ‘90. So, again, it’s pretty well contemporary, a year or so later actually than the Fuseli on the right-hand side. And it’s in your face. It fills up the canvas, and it’s right there in front of you. It’s sort of confrontational in a way that self-portraits almost never were before this period.

Now Fuseli first came to England, but was persuaded, no doubt partly by the advice of Sir Joshua Reynolds who actually liked him and helped him and encouraged him, but in his speeches, Joshua encouraged every despairing artist, “Of course, you must go to Italy. You must drink from the source of Western art, Classical art in Rome.” And Fuseli does go to Rome for the bulk of the 1770s, from 1770 to 1779. And he made this drawing of fragments of a giant statue of Constantine that survived in Rome.

And the title of this is, “The Artist Despairing at the Magnitude of Ancient Art.” So this, I mean, it’s a Classical image in a way. It’s an image of Classical sculpture and it’s in quite a Classical style, but it’s also a very Romantic image. This idea that the artist needs to aspire for something very great, beyond him, almost out of reach. This is a very Romantic idea. And Keats, you know, he’s an archetype of Romantic poet, a little bit later he says that he would rather be a failure than an non-entity. He wants to aspire to something, to greatness. And even if he failed in that aspiration, it’s better than not aspiring to this great thing.

So this is a self caricature, and of course a rather Classical style, of the artist leaving Italy. Suggests a certain disillusion with his time in Italy. And then he comes back to London and he spends the rest of his career based in Britain. 1781, he made his great breakthrough at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition with this picture called, “The Nightmare.” And of course, it’s an extremely powerful, disturbing image, a kind of horror image. Remember this is also the Early Romantic period, is the period of the Gothic novel.

Remember the heroine of “Northanger Abbey,” reading all these very ghoulish novels of supernatural and horrific events and sort of shuddering with delight. He also becomes involved with a scheme that’s always referred to as the Boydell Shakespeare. Alderman John Boydell, he was a city businessman, and he came up with an idea, a very Anglo-Saxon idea really, for promoting art or a new kind of patronage. Because British artists had often complained that we didn’t have a church that was after the Reformation, that the Church in England was no longer a significant patron of the arts in the way it was in Catholic countries.

Neither did we have a court that offered a significant patronage in the way that most, even a small country like Bavaria, the rulers of Bavaria invested a lot in art patronage in the way that the British monarchy has never done. And they also complained. I mean, Hogarth bitterly complained that, “Yes, the English aristocracy, they loved art and they spent lots of money on art, but they were really only interested in buying paintings by dead foreign artists. They weren’t interested in helping out or patronising English artists.”

So the British artist had a little bit of a inferiority complex about this, and Boydell came up with this rather clever idea that he was going to commission all the best artists of his time to do large, monumental sized paintings of subjects from Shakespeare’s plays. And this would encourage a National School of British Painting. And he hoped that it would pay for itself because he produced editions of prints after these pictures. And he thought that would subsidise the whole scheme.

In fact, of course, it didn’t really work out like that and it wasn’t a tremendous great financial success in the end, but quite a large number of paintings were commissioned. This is from Fuseli and it’s his take on, “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” obviously. Here the other artists involved included James Barry. This is his “King Lear” image at the top. And not everybody approved of this. And James Gillray, a satirical caricaturist, he was very critical. He felt that this was really too commercial and that it was sort of mammon taking over art. And he made this print that you see on the right-hand side attacking the whole scheme, and you can see various figures either borrowed from James Barry or from Fuseli in that image.

And this is Fuseli’s very, very strange take on “Falstaff.” I have to say, I don’t think these large paintings by Fuseli are very good paintings. I don’t think he’s a very good painter. Now the distinction here is I think he’s a very interesting, very original artist, but not a good painter. This perhaps is rather, this is more of a sketch, and I think this is quite powerful. Of course, it’s the murder scene from “Macbeth.” Oh! And there are also a number of paintings. I mean, he’s an artist. He’s very original and he can come up with very memorable, striking, disturbing images, like the nightmare image that I showed you a bit earlier, and sort of ambiguous, mysterious, hard to figure out, like this painting.

The title is “The Ladies of Hastings.” But nobody’s actually discovered what the story is behind this, if there is a story. It’s just a rather strange and memorable image, as is this painting of three smiling or laughing women. So women are the great inspiration of his work, as we’ll see in a minute. But I think he has quite… I mean, he was obviously a great lover of women or very powerfully, deeply sexually attracted to women, but I think he was also afraid of them and repelled by them. I think there’s actually quite a strong misogynistic element in a lot of his work, a lot of his best work actually. This very strange image is an illustration to the “Nibelungen.”

So long, long before Wagner. I mean, long before Wagner is even born, he develops an interest in these northern sagas. And this is Brunhilde who has tied up Gunther in her bedroom on her wedding night. And I love her sort of languorous reclining pose, which is of course very similar to two of the most famous paintings of Neoclassicism, the David “Portrait of Madame Recamier,” on the right-hand side and the Ingres, “Grande Odalisque,” top right. So similar. Of course, the pose is so close, isn’t it? Particularly to the Ingres.

But in fact, Fuseli predates both those images. I mean, Ingres is 1814. The “Madame Recamier” I think is something like 1801, 1802. And this dates from the 1790s. I think his most attractive, most interesting work, is in his drawings. He’s a wonderful draughtsman. Pen and ink here you can see, but also use of watercolour. And particularly these quite extraordinary images of women, often inspired by his wife, with whom he had quite a turbulent relationship. This is she again. So rather just amazing drawings, amazing drawings, that have a sort of hallucinatory quality to them.

Now we come to the main figure of my talk tonight, of course, is William Blake, who’s half a generation younger. He’s born in 1757. But I’m going to say some of the same things about him. I mean, he’s a great artist. He’s a great man. I wouldn’t describe him as a great painter, definitely not. But, well, I’ll elaborate on that in a minute. He’s, I think, one of the most fascinating personalities that the British Isles has ever produced. Of course, he wrote some of the most beautiful and some of the most widely loved poems in the English language. He also wrote sort of interminable screeds of epic poems that nobody ever reads. Or if they do, they don’t really understand them.

And as an artist, as a visual artist, he’s just a very strange mixture of sort of gauche, almost amateur from a technical point of view, mixed with incredible originality and inventiveness. This is of course a portrait of him that I think gives a good sense of his likeness and also that slightly mad visionary expression in his upturned eyes. So he’s born into reasonably comfortably of middle class family in what’s now Broadwick Street. His house actually it survived well into the 20th century. It’s really shocking that it was actually demolished. Really extraordinary.

You think one of the greatest and most original of all Englishmen, that they would’ve preserved his birthplace at Broadwick Street in Soho. And although his parents were dissenters, his father was a successful hosier, they were dissenters, he was actually baptised in the Church of St. James’s, Piccadilly. And rather wonderfully, the baptismal font in which he was baptised, carved by Grinling Gibbons, that survives in the church, even though it was bombed during the Second World War. So this is the very font in which Blake was baptised.

And it almost seems like fate because you see on this carved on this font, you can see John the Baptist baptising Jesus Christ on the bowl and around the stem of the font, we have the subject of Adam and Eve and the temptation from the Jewish Bible. And they’re both subjects, of course, that would be treated by Blake later in life. Got the baptism in the middle and the temptation of Adam and Eve, bottom right-hand side.

So as a boy, in 1772, he was apprentice to an engraver called James Basire, who you see his self-portrait at top left. And that was a seven year apprentice. That was normal, of course, in the 18th century. From 1772 to 1779. And during that period, Basire, he was a successful engraver and he provided the illustration for the famous “Stuart and Revett: Antiquities of Athens.” So that is important because Blake is steeped in antiquity and in the Classical. Despite being an archetypal Romantic, there is this very strong Classical element in his work. And one of the things that Basire got him to do was to go to Westminster Abbey and make drawings of all the Mediaeval tombs there.

This is a painting by a German artist called Nachume Miller. It’s actually in the: In Munich. And it shows what Westminster Abbey looked like in the 18th century. It was in a rather decayed state. This is before its Victorian revamps, but I’m sure that in itself probably would’ve appealed to William Blake. And he happened to be present when the tomb of the Mediaeval King Edward the First was opened. And it’s one of those stories that his body, when the tomb was open, the body was apparently perfectly preserved.

But of course, once it came into contact with the air, it disintegrated very quickly. And this is Blake’s drawing of the freshly opened tomb of Edward the First. I think the Mediaeval sculptures, tomb sculptures of Westminster Abbey, had a very profound and continuing influence on his work. So you’ve got these two in a way you’d think quite different types of art that influence him, the Classical and the Mediaeval Gothic. But what he draws from them, I mean, is a very strong linearity, which is a common feature of both.

And here are two later works by Blake. This is the “Songs of Experience,” as you can see on the left. That dates from 1793, I think that is. And “Pity” on the right-hand side, which was an independent monotype, painted monotype print. And in each case you can see the reclining figure looks very much like the kind of reclining figures you see on Mediaeval tombs in Westminster Abbey. Now 1779, having completed his apprenticeship, he, for a short time, enrols as a student at the Royal Academy. But he’s disgusted with the place.

He’s disgusted with Reynolds. He’s disgusted with the kind of teaching there and the kind of ideas of art that were promoted there. He had his copy of Reynold’s lectures, his so-called discourses, has survived and it’s annotated with insults throughout. You can see on the title of the pages, “This man was hired to depress art.” That is Blake’s opinion of Sir Joshua Reynolds. And of course, the teaching was very much based around life drawing. This is often his depiction of an anatomy and life drawing class at the Royal Academy.

But this didn’t suit Blake at all. He didn’t take to either the study of anatomy or to live drawing. He preferred to learn his anatomy and to learn his drawing skills from plaster casts, so the kind you see in the background of this image. But above all from prints. One of the greatest influences on him throughout his life was Michelangelo, particularly the Michelangelo, the Sistine ceiling and of “The Last Judgement .”

Of course, he never went to Italy, he never saw a Michelangelo painting in the flesh, so to speak. He only knew Michelangelo through engravings after his work. And this is on the right, you’ve got an engraving of Michelangelo’s “Last Judgement .” And on the left you have the same subject, “The Last Judgement ,” as drawn by Blake, pen and ink drawing. And that you can see. I mean, he might have had a very different reaction to Michelangelo if he’d actually seen them in colour, especially as they are now, you know?

They’re almost sort of psychedelic colours after the cleaning of the Sistine ceiling. So at the Royal Academy, I suppose amongst the younger artists, the Neoclassicism was very much in vogue. Some of you may have caught my earlier lectures on the Neoclassical movement, which it begins in Rome in the 1760s but it is entirely a creation of Northern artists and theorists, the main figures of Neoclassicism. The German historian Winckelmann and around him he had a circle of British, American, Swedish and German artists. Not Italians.

This is an elaborate, I don’t know whether really it’s more of a drawing really, it’s a coloured drawing, that Blake made in his year at the Royal Academy. Dates from 1779. And it’s a story from Mediaeval history. Jane Shore, “The Penance of Jane Shore,” who’s a royal mistress who was forced to do public penance. And of course it’s very different from the way to imagine how a Victorian artist would’ve painted this subject, who would’ve really researched the costume and got it right and made it look a bit Mediaeval.

Blake is not really interested in that. It’s got a… In fact, the costume is more Classical than Mediaeval and the treatment of the material, the drapery, which is very sculptural, the smooth ironed material that clings to and defines the body underneath, that is very Classical. And also very typical of Early Neoclassicism, is the way the composition is arranged as a frieze in a very shallow area of space. And you can see that space is defined by the floor, which is like a sort of giant chess set.

So all these elements you find are very common to Early Neoclassical painting. This is Benjamin West, who I mentioned last week as being very important as the inventor of the modern history painting. He’s also quite important as a pioneer of this new Neoclassical style. And the features, many of the features I just pointed out, you can see in a slightly amateurish way that Blake is aiming for something similar.

But his first really original and wonderful creation, both as a poet and as an artist, are the “Songs of Innocence.” And you can see that date, yes, 1789, which is the date of the start of the French Revolution. And of course, many, many people around the world, idealists, when the French Revolution broke up, they thought, “Ah, this is the dawn of a new age, an age of liberty, equality, fraternity, of basic decent human values.” Yet throwing away, getting rid of ignorance and privilege and all those bad things in the Ancien Regime, and superstition and all those kind of things.

And remember the famous words of Wordsworth that, “It was wonderful to be alive because you really felt you were at the dawn of a wonderful new age.” You know, now it’s something that’s been repeated, I think many people felt that about the start of the Russian Revolution for its first few years. I can remember having a similar feeling in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down and the old Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain. All of that suddenly seemed like a wonderful possibility for a new peaceful and more humane world.

Course, it hasn’t turned out that way in our lifetime and it didn’t turn out that way with the French Revolution in Blake’s lifetime. And like many people, of course, he was very quickly disillusioned when the French Revolution turned sour and the revolutionaries actually perpetrated atrocities that were worse than the old regime. But at this point, I have to say his technique is, in many ways, almost childlike, almost amateur. But already you have this extraordinary originality and a completely original way of thinking. But of course not as Sir Joshua Reynolds would’ve said, “Nothing comes out of nothing.”

And even though Blake is so original, of course he’s looking back as well as forward. And one of the things he’s looking back to is the Mediaeval illuminated manuscript. I mean, many people felt that the invention of the printing press, the invention of printing, destroyed the book as a work of art. And so Blake wanted, of course, his books were printed, but he wanted to have the book to be, to use that wonderful German term: A total work of art so that the text is very beautiful, the typology of the typography is very beautiful, the decoration around the text, and the illustration should be fused to create, turn the book into a total work of art.

So there you’ve got a Mediaeval manuscript on the right-hand side and a page from “Songs of Innocence” on the left. Well, once the horrors of the Terror, with a capital T, broke out, we have this slaughter with the guillotine, in Paris that has chilled the blood of the British ever since. You know, think of Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Her ultimate expression of horror was, “It reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.” And I think Blake was horrified as everybody else was.

And so 1793, we have of course the Terror and the execution of Louis 16th and Marie Antoinette and many innocent people, was 1792 to 3. And so he then brings out “Songs of Experience” and actually brings out a joint edition of the two, “Innocence and Experience.” This is from… I think it’s from the first volume of “Innocence,” “The Divine Image.” And so these books, he was using a process which was really unique to him at the time in that the illustration and the decorative border and the text are all printed simultaneously on the same block or the same sheet of metal.

And it’s then they are hand coloured. And so, I mean of these books of Blake, I mean they’re only usually a couple of dozen copies of each of his books, and they will be hand coloured by Blake and his wife, Catherine, as they were required. So each copy of “Songs of Innocence and Experience” is actually quite individual and different from the others. Here is a very touching little drawing of Blake’s wife Catherine. Now I’m sure you’ve heard me say before, 'cause I always used to say to my students every year at Christie’s, “Don’t marry an artist. Artists are very, very bad spouse material.” And the numbers of really happy marriages amongst great artists are quite small.

Rubens, I think probably both his marriages, Constable’s another example. Chagall with certainly his first wife, I’m not sure about the second. You know, there were a few. And I think this was actually, it was a wonderful marriage 'cause it was a partnership, and she contributed very much to the creation of these books, helping to colour the books. She was a very simple woman. He actually married her on the rebound. He was devastated to be rejected by somebody else and she sympathised with him. And apparently the proposal came about when he said, “If you pity me, I love you.” And she agreed to marry him.

As I said, they were very happy. They didn’t have children. And influenced by Swedenborgian philosophy, he, at one point entertained the idea of taking a concubine to have his children. But when he understood how upset she was by this idea, he dropped the idea. And of all accounts of them sitting naked in the back garden in Lamberth and working together, it sounds like it was a wonderful, loving, working relationship.

Now this serpentine line, which is such a distinctive and interesting feature of Blake, where does this come from? Because it’s really out of step, I would say, with the Classicism of the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. So what you see here, top right image, is a defining piece of architecture for Neoclassicism. It’s the Barriere de la Villette, it’s actually about seven minutes walk from where I’m sitting now. It’s the end of the Rue Lafayette. I could leave my flat and be there really at a trot in five minutes. And that dates from… That was actually being built, it was just completed at the time of the French Revolution. So it’s almost exactly contemporary with the “Songs of Innocence.”

But you can see this Neoclassical, it’s very sharp separation of parts. Although you’ve got a circular element at the top of the building, it’s mostly very rectilinear, and certainly not in any way organic. So you could say that in some ways, Blake is, he’s such an eccentric figure. He’s really hard to pigeonhole. So is he incredibly ahead of his time? Or is he rather behind his time? He’s just sort of out of the cycle, so to speak. On the left we have the Rococo style. This is designed by Juste-Aurele Meissonnier, one of the leading designers in France of the period of Louis the 15th, in the early to mid 18th century, where you can see this very organic quality and the love of curving line.

So you could say that Blake is in some way a throwback to that. Here again is a comparison between Meissonnier on the left and Blake on the right. Now in the book, “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” very often you’ll find that the poems in a way go in pairs. So you have “Infant Joy” in “Songs of Innocence,” paired with “Infant Sorrow” in “Songs of Experience.” “The Lamb” in “Songs of Innocence,” with the famous “Tiger.” This of course is one of the most famous poems in the entire English language. “Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forest of the night.” It’s such a fantastic image as in words.

I mean I like it, of course, it’s wonderful, it’s charming. It’s a rather cuddly little tiger at the bottom. Although I don’t think at this stage, Blake is quite capable of matching the power of his words with an equally powerful image. Now he always remained an idealist. He’s a liberal, and so even though he rejects the Enlightenment, in some ways he is a man of the Enlightenment. And there’s a strongly political element to a lot of his work. Here are two poems from “Songs and Experience” that “The Chimney Sweeper.”

This is a period of the early Industrial Revolution where as yet people always, you’ll find in Britain, if people want to condemn something as really awful, they say, “Oh, it’s positively Victorian.” You know? Abuse of women, abuse of children or whatever. But I always defend the Victorians because they were the first people to really introduce legislation to protect the rights of women and children. They were the first people to wither a kind of conscience to be aware of these things. Before, I mean, the early years of the Industrial Revolution were extremely brutal with children sent down mines and up chimneys and working class men press ganged in the street. No idea of human rights whatsoever.

So Blake is very, very ahead of his time. And this very moving poem, “The Little Black Boy,” which has the condemnation of racism or prejudice against somebody because of the colour of their skin. Has it ever been more beautifully expressed than in this poem by Blake? And these, I just, I’m going to go through quite quickly 'cause I’m going to run out of time. Such famous poem, such memorable, extraordinary poems. “The Sick Rose” and “The Poison Tree.” So moving into the 19th century, he wrote these great prophetic books, “America: A Prophecy,” “Europe: A Prophecy.” We can certainly see his style becoming less clumsy, more sophisticated, and he continues to explore the visual relationship between text and decoration and illustration, and in all sorts of inventive and interesting ways.

This is the title page of “Europe: A Prophecy.” And you’ve got the “Ancient of Days,” it’s an image of God. Now he’s a very, very spiritual man, he’s a very religious man, but he rejected all forms of organised religion. And actually, he’s not that keen on God. You might say, “Yes. Look at all. How?” The idea that there is this all-powerful, all-controlling old man with white hair up in the sky and yet He lets all these horrible things happen. Think of all the horrible things that have happened in the 20th century. And also so that you see God here with a pair of dividers. And that for Blake is actually a very negative image of control and rationality, which he actually sees as being an inhibiting and a bad thing. And another.

This is from “Europe: A Prophecy.” Another wonderful example of this whiplash curving line of Blake. And so he has a very, makes a modest living. He gets commissions. He never really has very much success. People thought he was nuts and eccentric. But this is his illustrations to Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts,” which were very popular poems in the 18th, early 19th century. Comes up with a new very interesting idea because the text here was a given, and yet he finds very interesting ways to incorporate the printed text into his illustrations. Milton, his kind of, not epic poem, inspired by the great 17th century poet, Milton, I suppose particularly famous for this wonderful poem, “Jerusalem.”

And so, I mean, the Brits listening to this will all know this poem by heart. And it is I think one of the most beautiful poems in the English language. And they’ll also know it from Hubert Parry’s famous musical setting of it, which we’re all very familiar with it, and we hear it of course on the last night of the proms. It’s almost an alternative national anthem. And it might actually become a national anthem, I think, of England. I mean, who knows what’s going to happen in the near future? But after the passing of our present dear Queen, and with the very likely post-Brexit breakup of United Kingdom, England may find itself on its own.

And this I think would be the very likely, the Hubert Parry setting of this poem. It would be a very likely choice for a new national anthem. And I mean, those of you who don’t know it, who are not British, I recommend. I just had an email yesterday from my great friend Michael Foster in Munich. We were talking about “Jerusalem,” and he mentioned the Paul Robeson record of it. And I went straight to YouTube. Listen to it. So beautiful. So moving. So if you’ve got time after this talk, I suggest you all go onto YouTube and listen to Paul Robeson sing “Jerusalem.” I’m going to move on a bit quickly here.

So he really develops an extraordinary, if eccentric, mastery as you move into the 19th century. And I would say his greatest achievement from a visual point of view are the illustrations that he produced in the 1820s for Dante’s “Inferno.” These were commissioned by a younger artist of means who admired him called John Liddell. And he was really on a roll, I think, when he did these. And he apparently, while he was ill in bed over a period of a fortnight, he produced a hundred of these drawings and they’re absolutely extraordinary.

This is Paolo and Francesca in purgatory in the circle of the lustful who are damned for eternity to whirl in a sort of in passionate circles. But as you can see that Dante, he’s so moved by the story of Paulo and Francesca, who even though they’re in Hell because they’re together, it’s heaven for them, and he’s fallen into a dead faint. And how about this one? I mean, this is so extraordinary. It looks to me, I mean, almost, he could of course have known Indian miniatures, Mogul miniatures. It has a sort of Indian look to it. And there was certainly plenty of trade going on between India and Britain at this time.

This is Cerberus the three-headed dog that guards the entrance to Hades and all these wonderful punishments. This is the corrupt Pope, the Simony Pope, being boiled forever in Hell. And another set of particularly wonderful prints are inspired by the all watercolours, and later they became prints, they were turned into prints, by the Book of Job. And notice here the geometricized stylization in the background that looks. The whiplash things look almost Art Nouveau, well ahead of Art Nouveau.

But here he seems to have gone beyond Art Nouveau and he’s anticipating almost Art Deco. Though he didn’t paint in oils, he worked in various odd combinations of using sometimes glue as a medium and mixing media, sometimes with very disastrous results, or paintings that haven’t lasted very well. But he produced a whole series of these large monotype prints, which are then in effect, even though the initial image maybe be a print, they are really individual paintings.

This is his image of Newton. Again, for him, Newton was not a goodie, Newton was a baddie. That you didn’t want to try and rationalise and explain the universe, it should be a mystery. And of course it’s inspired this wonderful “Paolozzi Newton,” which you can see outside the British Library.

And this is Nebuchadnezzar from the same series. This is a tiny little picture that’s in the Tait Gallery of “A Ghost of a Flea.” And Blake claimed to have visions and to be able to see ghosts. And people came to him from the other side. There’s some kind of discussion or speculation about whether he was actually pulling people’s legs and he enjoyed persuading gullible people that he had visions or whether he… So we don’t really know if he had these visions or not.

Towards quite late in his life, you can see in 1821, he was commissioned to illustrate an English translation of “Virgil.” And he produced these wood block prints, very simple, very naive, that for the first time, I suppose inevitable with “Virgil,” that landscape plays a big role in his work. Now the publisher, when he first saw the designs, thought they were laughably inept and didn’t want to publish them. He was persuaded by various distinguished artists, unexpected supporters of Blake like Sir Thomas Lawrence, and he published them, but with almost like a health warning.

He said that, “These prints show less art than genius.” And what he meant by that was that he thought that they were lacking in skill. They may be very original but not very skillful. And so these- But they had a tremendous impact, these prints. And Blake, by this time, he was quite elderly, and as I said, he never achieved any real success or reputation during his lifetime. Really scraped a living with the help of various supporters and patrons. But right at the end of his life, he gathered around him a group of artists who were all young enough to be his grandchildren, who revered him as a kind of Old Testament prophet and were very inspired by him.

This is George Richmond. And this, it could almost that… I mean it’s technically got more sophisticated, of course, than Blake, but it’s very Blakey and it’s obviously in its composition. And he also painted this little picture of Christ and the woman of Samaria. But all these young artists, it was a brief phase that they were very influenced by Blake and they all went onto other things. I mean, this is George Richmond who had a very long life and became a kind of sloshy society portraitist, that’s his self-portrait. You’d never think that the artist who painted this would go on to paint things like that. This is Edward Culvert also who did these beautiful landscapes, prints very much inspired by Blake’s “Virgil.”

But I’m going to move on to finish with Samuel Palmer, who’s another of these young artists. They call themselves the ancients who are followers of Blake. Very intense, this frontal self-portrait, which is characteristic of the Romantic period. Most earlier self-portraits are ¾ views. And the front, this is you think slightly blasphemous actually, 'cause this is really a self-portrait as Jesus on the right-hand side by Samuel Palmer. And so, this forward gaze, frontal format, suggesting Jesus.

Here’s the most expensive painting ever sold, the “Salvator Mundi,” that may or may not be by Leonardo da Vinci. So all of Palmer’s best, he was a very long lived artist, but actually his great work was all produced in a short five year period at the beginning of his career where he lived in the Village of Shoreham in Kent. And he’s primarily a landscape artist. And he’s unlike Blake, where of course his landscapes come completely from imagination, you can tell with Palmer that there is a basis in fact, in reality, that something like this is drawn from something that really existed.

And this is a real tree. And you know, if you bump into this tree on Hampstead Heath, you recognise it and you know it’s a portrait of a tree in a way that a portrait of this is a Constable portrait of a particular tree that actually is on Hampstead Heath. Or this is Casper. He’s closer, I suppose, to Casper David Friedrich, who in this very almost mystical religious feeling in his contemplation of the tree.

And these gloriously poetic, I’m going to go through quite quickly, Casper David Friedrich again on the left, who I’ll be talking about on Sunday. So it’s a view of landscape that’s permeated with spirituality and with strong religious feeling. And so, as he’s looking intensely, intensely at nature, at the bark of trees, at a rabbit, at leaves. But I see him sort of going around sort of really concentrating on, and so you get this sort of exaggeration, enlargement of certain things, that he’s concentrating on.

When I look at these drawings, I think of the famous scene of “In the Sufferings of Young Werther,” of Gerta, when the poet, he throws himself on the ground and he embraces nature and he’s celebrating his oneness with nature. And that’s the feeling I get from these wonderful drawings by Samuel Palmer. I’m finishing off very quickly to looking at Blake’s legacy. He had this following of a small group of artists at the end of his life, but after that, of course, like I said, like Goya, like so many artists, he was forgotten. And it was actually the pre-Raphaelites, it was Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris who rediscovered him, and the Arts and Crafts movement.

Mackmurdo was a leading designer architect of the Arts and Crafts movement. And this is his title page for a book on “Wrens City Churches.” Nothing to do with Blake or anything like Blake, but this dates from 1883. And you can see that he’s looking at Blake’s use of the whiplash line. William Morris inspired to set up the Kelmscott Press in 1891, with the same ideal of reviving the art of the book, and a book which is a beautiful thing in which there is a unity between illustration and text. Walter Crane following very much in the same kind of tradition.

And now this is a bit of a one-off. This is Rodin’s “Gates of Hell,” which the subject matter again is Dante’s “Inferno.” When he originally got the commission, it was all going to be divided up into panels like Ghiberti, like a Renaissance door. But he came to London, he met, and through Alphonse Lagro, he was introduced to the work of Blake. And I think it’s particularly this great swirl of waves of figures from the circle of the lustful made a great impression on Rodin, and he took this idea for his “Gates of Hell.”

Then we get to 1892, the birth of Art Nouveau in Brussels. This is the very first fully Art Nouveau interior, Maison Tassel, 1892, Victor Horta, with the whiplash line becoming a unifying motif. And this is my last image. So Blake continues to inspire many artists. This is actually a relief in the Rockefeller Centre in New York dating from the 1930s in the Art Deco style. Very directly inspired, of course, by Blake’s “Ancient of Days.” So that is it.

And I see we have a few questions, so I’m going to go into those.

Q&A and Comments

No, this James Barry is nothing to do with the author of “Peter Pan.” Not connected in any way.

What makes me think by? Well, have a look at the images, how sinister they are. There’s a very strong element of… In a way that you find very often in the art of the end of the 19th century that women are attractive, but in a dangerous and destructive way.

Q: Who did the portrait of William Blake? A: No, it’s not a self-portrait. And it’s by… Who is it by? Oh God, I’ve written it down somewhere. It’s not by anybody who’s very- Phillips. I think it’s by Phillips.

Someone’s saying, “There’s an interesting novel by Tracy Chevalier, 'Burning Bright,’ which is about Blake in London.

Q: To what extent, if any, did these three men sow seeds for the Symbolist Art movement?” A: Yes, they did. Ron is asking that. They certainly did. Via the pre-Raphaelites, I would say. I’m not sure about Palmer ‘cause Palmer actually wasn’t really rediscovered till the 20th century. But certainly Blake in particular, had wrote he was an influence on the Symbolists via the pre-Raphaelites, I would say.

Apropo artists as spouses. There was an exhibition at the Barbican a few years ago, of artists and their muses, many of them married or in partnership. Started with Rodin. Well, that’s a terrible story for a start. Rodin. Rodin, I’m afraid, completely underlines my case that it’s not really a very good idea to get involved with an artist.

Q: What separates the artist from a painter? A: Well, simply the medium, you know? An artist can be a sculptor, could be a print maker, could be anything. Anybody who practises art. A painter is somebody who creates something with the brush and paint.

Q: Were Blake’s use of curving lines a source of influence on the Art Nouveau? A: Yes, absolutely. I think I’ve answered that actually. They were. An almost loved the human form in Heaven, Turk or Jew, where mercy, love, pity dwell, their God is dwelling too.

Q: Did he act on these sentiments? A: As far as I know he did. I think he did. You know, I think he led… I mean, God knows. Somebody’s out there probably now as I’m saying this, digging around, to find some awful reason why we should topple his statue. But as far as I know, he really did follow his precepts.

My daughter’s school choir sang “Jerusalem” when she was about 11 at Toronto Roy Thompson Hall. It was really a very special occasion and the young choir did an amazing job. I mean, if Hubert Parry had never written anything else, he would have his immortality for that wonderful song.

Blake Beardsley. Yes, definitely Influenced by Blake. Via Burne-Jones and Rossetti.

Painting of Newton makes me think he should have stayed with the anatomy classes. Yes, he wasn’t really very interested in anatomy. You can criticise him on those grounds, I suppose.

Dissidents. No dissenters, I think. Was that? Dissenters are Protestants who do not acknowledge the Queen as the head of the Church or the organised Church of England.

Q: Who bought his works? A: Yes, quite a lot. There were various. Thomas Butts, it was Haley who gave him his cottage at Feltham. He had his devoted followers and patrons who kept him going.

And is that it? Oh no. A biography. Oh! Dear. I should really… You make me think each week I should really check this out, shouldn’t I? What? I’ll check it out and let you know the next talk, what I think the best biography. There must be many, many biographies of Blake.

Incidentally, Miriam Margoles, who’s listening in, I don’t know if she’s listening to this one. She sent me a review, a new biography of Goya. It didn’t really sound as though it was actually very readable, and in fact the reviewers said that, “Much better to stick to the Robert Hughes ones I mentioned last time.”

Hogarth promoted the serpentine line. Yes, he did. And people have, of course, Blake was certainly very, very familiar with Hogarth’s work and his prints and that could have been an influence as well on his use of the serpentine line.

Somebody’s saying they were uplifted by “Jerusalem,” played by the Beatles at the V and A. Yes! Good.

I see Judy again, so I think that’s it.

• There’s no more questions. That’s right. Thank you so much, Patrick. And thank you, everybody. Thank you to everybody that joined us this evening and we’ll see everybody in about an hour for Trudy Gold.

• Yep.

• [Judy] Thanks, Patrick. And thank you to everybody. Bye-Bye.