Blake’s Poems on Art and Artists

Abstract

My subject is Blake’s conflict with the artistic values of his own time as expressed in certain writings of the years 1798 to 1811. These comprise his annotations to the second edition (1798) of The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds with a very long Introduction by Edmond Malone, his Descriptive Catalogue of 1809, the Public Address of 1809–10, the Vision of the Last Judgment of 1810 and a number of Notebook poems written from perhaps 1807 until 1812.¹ The first four have been given considerable attention by scholars, while the last has not. Perhaps because of their free-and-easy manner, doggerel rhyming and frequently outrageous humour, Blake’s poems about art and artists have never been given serious — or even flippant — consideration in their own right. I want to argue that they have great interest both as satire and as expressions of Blake’s views about art, artists and the art market, and also that a major impetus for them was Blake’s reaction to an event that has also been little discussed in relation to him: the Orléans Sale of 1798, the greatest sale of Italian, French and Spanish paintings that had ever taken place in London. First, I will address the question of why Blake did not express his views about art earlier, especially when there had been a previous Orläans sale, of the Dutch and Flemish paintings in the collection, in 1793.