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Blake was born at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, London, England into a middle-class family. His artistic talent was noticed and encouraged from an early age. At ten years old, he began engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities, a practice that was then preferred to real-life drawing. Four years later he became apprenticed to an engraver, Henry Basire. After two years Basire sent him to copy art from the Gothic churches in London. At the age of twenty-one Blake finished his apprenticeship and set up as a professional engraver.
In 1779 he became a student at the Royal Academy, where he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens. He preferred the Classical exactness of Michelangelo and RaphaelFor other references to Raphael please see Raphael (disambiguation . Raphael or Raffaello ( 6th April 1483 6th April 1520 see note below), also called Raffaello Sanzio, Raffaello Santi, Raffaello da Urbino or Rafael Sanzio de Urbino was a painter and arch.
In 1782Events January 7 The first American commercial bank opens ( Bank of North America). January 15 Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris goes before the United States Congress to recommend establishment of a national mint and decimal coinage February 5 Span Blake met John Flaxman, who was to become his patron. In the same year he married a poor illiterate girl named Catherine Boucher, who was five years his junior. Catherine could neither read nor write and even signed her wedding contract with an X. Blake taught her reading and writing and even trained her as an engraver. At that time, George Cumberland, one of the founders of the National GalleryThe National Gallery is an art gallery in London, located on the north side of Trafalgar Square, in a building designed by William Wilkins. It holds part of the National Collection, particularly Western European art from 1250 to 1900. Some British art is, became an admirer of Blake's work.
Blake's first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches , was published circa 1783Events February 3 American Revolutionary War: Spain recognizes United States independence. February 4 American Revolutionary War: Great Britain formally declares that it will cease hostilities with the United States of America. May 18 Saint John, New Brun. In 1788, at the age of thirty-one, Blake began to experiment with "relief etching", which was the method used to produce most of his books of poems. Blake claimed the method was revealed to him in a vision of his dead brother, Robert. The process is also referred to as "illuminated printing," and final products as "illuminated books" or "prints." Illuminated printing involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in acid in order to dissolve away the untreated copper and leave the design standing. The pages printed from these plates then had to be hand-colored in water colors and stiched together to make up a volume. Blake used illuminated printing for four of his works: the Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem. Each of his illuminated books was thus a unique work of art and a radical break with not only traditional book printing but the traditional means of presenting poetic and philosophical discourse. Blake seems to have believed, or rather hoped, that self-published books could liberate the artist and author from the tyranny of censorship by Church and State but its time-consuming nature meant that his most personal and prophetic works reached a minute audience in his lifetime.
Blake also became a friend of the painter John Henry Fuseli.
Blake had an idiosyncratic view of his Christian religion. In 1789 William and Catherine joined the Swedenborgian New Church. He believed that the truth was learned by personal revelation, not by teaching. What he called his 'visions' were perhaps hallucinations, experiences that he allowed to guide his life. It was these that gave him such a strong and uncompromising belief in his own artistic direction, but also led others to call him eccentric or even mad.
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake began to develop his own mythology, which included a pantheon of characters such as Orc , a messiah and Urizen, a cruel Old Testament-style god. Blake loved Milton's work and Blake tried, as Milton had, to create his own definitions of heaven and hell. This desire to recreate the cosmos is the heart of his work and his psychology. His myths often described the struggle between enlightenment and free love on the one hand, and restrictive education and morals on the other. Blake believed himself a prophet of a New Age, and his identification with free love and democracy has helped to make him a hero of many modern artists. The poet W. B. Yeats admired Blake's spiritualism and helped to popularise him in the 20th century.
The Last Judgement is a work in which Blake sums up and illustrates all the mythology that he has created.
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