The Drawings and Engravings of William Blake by Laurence Binyon

Author:Laurence Binyon
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Art
Publisher: The University of Adelaide Library
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

VII.

Edward Calvert, who under Blake’s inspiration was to make some of the most exquisite small engravings ever done in England, served in the Navy as a midshipman; then determined to forsake the sea and follow art. He came up to London from Devon and sought out a stockbroker, Mr. John Giles, on business of property; and the conversation having diverged to “the grandeur of the ancients,” Mr. Giles went on to tell him of “the divine Blake, who has seen God, sir, and talked with angels.”

I always think that Mr. Butts, who for so many years was the external support of Blake’s imaginative life, commissioning from him a long series of paintings and drawings, must have been of a kindred nature with this delightful, improbable, but quite real stock-broker, John Giles. With their homely English names, and, as one conceives, their innate and innocent reverence for the man of genius, they remind one of those sympathetic natures, all delicacy and sensitiveness within, which Mr. Conrad has discerned and revealed sometimes under the plain, ruddy exterior of an English sea-captain. And I think it an honour to our race that it produces such natures, little versed in terms of art, perhaps, but in such a man as Thomas Butts appearing as a patron how precious to discover, when we remember the pomp and vanity of the great patrons of art, the Popes and potentates, who thwarted and wasted even while they encouraged the genius of men like Michelangelo.

The Butts collection contained much of Blake’s finest work, both in tempera and in water-colour.

Of Blake’s pictures it is difficult to speak, since few of them probably retain their original appearance, and some are darkened wrecks. We learn from the Descriptive Catalogue that he painted at one time in oils; then made a number of what he called “experiment pictures,” of which he says that they were “bruised and knocked about without mercy, to try all experiments.”

In the end he satisfied himself with a kind of tempera painting, using glue instead of the egg medium, on gesso over canvas, panel, copper, or steel. This he absurdly called “fresco,” and asserted that the pictures done in this medium “are known to be unchangeable.”

I knew the Nelson guiding Leviathan (Plate 52) when it was in the possession of the late Mr. T. W. Jackson, of Oxford. It was so dim and darkened that the forms were hardly distinguishable: but before he left it to the nation Mr. Jackson had it restored (in no way repainted) by Mr. Littlejohn, the chief mounter at the Print Room, who had a genius for such work, and whose untimely death in action in the war was a national loss. As it appears now at the Tate Gallery, it makes Blake’s assertion that “clearness and precision have been the chief objects in painting these pictures” seem less preposterous than it does when contemplating the Pitt or The Bard. Mr. Sturge Moore thinks these two Blake’s finest “frescoes.” The Bard makes one

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