Newton

By 1795 Isaac Newton had been dead almost 70 years and stood as England's great hero of reason, the man who had measured the universe. William Blake could not stand what that worship did to the imagination. So he drew Newton naked at the bottom of the sea, so fixed on the diagram under his compass that he has stopped noticing the living rock behind him. The compass is the same tool Blake handed his tyrant god Urizen elsewhere, the instrument that shrinks an infinite world down to something you can measure. Blake once wrote that art is the tree of life and science the tree of death. He made this by pressing paint from a board onto paper, one of about a dozen large color prints from these years, and reworked it again a decade later.