William Blake

A highly idiosyncratic poet, painter and printmaker, William Blake has come to represent the Romantic ideal of the artist, cruelly overlooked during their own lifetime. Having displayed early promise in drawing, he was apprenticed to the engraver James Basire at the age of 14. He later briefly attended the Royal Academy, where he made important friendships with the likeminded John Flaxman and Henry Fuseli. He would work as a commercial engraver for the rest of his career, but from around 1787 he began to produce illustrations for his own poems. These were full of spiritual and philosophical allusions, drawing on what he claimed were visionary powers. His Songs of Innocence (1789) demonstrate his remarkable ‘prophetic’ powers of expression and suggestive mysticism. Despite his lack of commercial success and reputation for madness amongst his contemporaries, he has since come to be seen as a towering genius of the Romantic era.