William Blake

William Blake is remembered first as a poet, the man who wrote The Tyger and the lines that became the hymn Jerusalem. But he trained as an engraver and earned his living by the trade, cutting other people's designs into copper for booksellers, and that is why he sits among the painters here. Drawing and printing were his craft long before his verse found any readers.

Around 1788, in London, he worked out a method he called illuminated printing. Instead of the usual division of labor, where one man wrote, another drew, and an engraver copied it all onto the plate, Blake did every part himself. He painted his words and pictures directly onto the copper in an acid-resistant varnish, etched the plate so the design stood up in relief, printed it, and then colored each page by hand with his wife Catherine. Poem and image came off the same plate, inseparable, the way he thought they should be.

Almost no one bought them. He sold his illuminated books in tiny numbers to a handful of loyal patrons, was thought by many to be mad, and spent his last years making huge watercolors of scenes from Dante for one sympathetic friend, the painter John Linnell. He died in London in August 1827, and the people at his bedside said he spent his final hours singing, hymns and songs of his own making, at the top of his voice.