A VISION OF THE ARTIST AT WORK by Penny Dolan

Imagine.

The ancient abbey is vast and, in later centuries, will be crowded with ornate memorials. Nevertheless, now – in London, in 1771 – a few historic effigies and tombs can be seen in the shadowy aisles, their carvings worn and their paint faded.  

The newly-reformed Society of Antiquaries is eager to have a record of these treasures for surely their own nation’s history is now as worthy of study as the classical world? 


A series of careful engravings are required, and that is why the boy sits in the hallowed gloom, pencil in hand, drawing the long dead. His master, James Basire, the foremost architectural line engraver in London, has chosen this fourteen year old apprentice specifically for this stage of the commission.  
 
First of all, the boy has been copying casts of classical statues since he was ten. He has the ability to draw a good foot, a hand, a torso, a head, a detail and more. Secondly – and maybe this is just as important a reason – Master Basire knows the boy has a passionate, argumentative nature and that he is easiest when left to work alone. Certainly, the lad’s brain seems fit to burst with his tales of biblical visions and lines from scripture and Milton’s poetry. 
 

 

Time passes. The boy works. The tall windows let in little daylight so he lights a candle stub or two. The small flames make the tombs look like great four-poster beds: the stone slabs in place of soft mattresses and the hard, carved canopy instead of curtains overhead.

His task, in drawing each tomb, is to demonstrate it from every angle and produce a record of every important detail and inscription. 

Down below, under the fine stonework, he knows the bodies are waiting. Once or twice, where stones have been cracked and shifted, he spied bones and breathed dust from the darkness within.Now he raises his head and stares. 
Up there, high up on their stony beds, the strange elongated effigies of old kings and queens face upwards, heavenwards, God-wards. The royal features are not for common, everyday eyes to view - and yet the Society has asked for a true record of all that is there, have they not?

Fortunately, the boy is determined, as well as small for his fourteen years. When the abbey is quiet, he climbs right up on to the tombs and stands there, just below the carved canopies. Leaning forward, he draws the human figures at his feet, reaching out to measure the features as he does so. Some of the tombs are so low that he is forced to kneel or crouch almost nose to nose with the cold, dead faces. He does not mind: his imagination feeds on these moments. 

He works. Now and then, he hears voices echo in the sacred air and once ghostly monks passed in a procession. He does not mind. Such spectres are better than the flesh-and-blood schoolboys who visit the abbey, mocking him and his work. He glances down at his marked knuckles, his eyes still alight with righteous anger. Master Basire was correct about that temper.

Imagine the boy, working. Imagine what patterns this particular work must be forming in his mind. 

All his youthful energies are bound up with the spirits of this place: the sense of history, of worldly and godly glory, of living words cut into stone, of the eternal victory of death - and of his own dreams, eagerly calling him on to great things. All he sees, hears and feels while working alone in that place will go into his own work. He pauses, stretches his shoulders, bends over and draws again.

The building is Westminster Abbey.

The boy? His name is William Blake.

As I began reading Peter Ackroyd’s excellent biography of Blake, I came across his account of this stage in the boy’s apprenticeship and, startled by the scene conjured up, used it as a starting point for my own writing, above.

Adolescent experiences can be intense enough to imprint perceptions that persist long afterwards - especially if you are an imaginative young apprentice working twelve hours a day, six days a week, and with a head constantly spinning with new thoughts and half-biblical visions.

Reading about Blake standing on the tombs, I felt as if a half-recognised aspect of Blake’s work had suddenly become understandable. 

There is, of course, the strongly sculptural nature of many of his figures, but I also wondered – and this is only my thought which you can take or leave – whether the young artist, leaning over the effigies on the tombs, had so absorbed the physical and bodily memory of that encounter that he recreated that stance over and over again in the form and shape of his paintings and artwork.

Is this idea possible? Did the familiar "Blake" shape of the bending deity or spirit, leaning over the human come from something remembered in his own body? What do you think?

Meanwhile, I must see more and read more of Ackroyd’s William Blake - and maybe more elsewhere, including Blake’s own account - and see what I discover.

 

Penny Dolan

Seeing Angels - Katherine Langrish

The Ancient of Days

Reading Peter Ackroyd’s biography of William Blake (‘Blake’, Vintage) I found a marvellous account of how Blake saw the Archangel Gabriel in his study. Blake was reading Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ when he came to a passage where the poet asks ‘who can paint an angel?’ Blake shut the book and mused aloud:

Blake: Aye! Who can paint an angel?
Voice: Michel Angelo could.


He looked about but saw nothing except ‘a greater light than usual’.


Blake: And how do you know?
Voice: I know, for I sat to him: I am the arch-angel Gabriel.
Blake: Oho! You are, are you? I must have better assurance than that of a wandering voice; you may be an evil spirit – there are such in the land.
Voice: You shall have good assurance. Can an evil spirit do this?


And then Blake saw a shining, winged shape, which ‘dilated more and more: he waved his hands; the roof of my study opened; he ascended into heaven; he stood in the sun, and beckoning to me, moved the universe.’

As is well known, Blake saw visions all his life. As a child of about four he was frightened (his wife reminded him) by a vision of God who ‘put his head to the window and set you a-screaming’; as a slightly older child he saw a tree bespangled full of angels, and met the Prophet Ezekiel out in the fields. As a man, he saw, conversed with and drew ‘Spectres of the Dead’, angels, Jesus, ‘the ghost of a flea’. He saw ‘the Ancient of Days’ hovering at the top of his narrow, dim staircase.

The Ghost of a Flea

None of this did him any favours in practical real-life terms. Some friends revered him, but a much larger proportion considered him eccentric and odd, if not outright mad. Blake was one of those artists and poets who are not much appreciated in their own lifetimes. He always struggled to make a living, and financial and social success eluded him. And yet he was rightly convinced of his own genius, so much so that one can’t feel the pity for him that one feels for Vincent Van Gogh or John Keats, dying before they could know of their own undying fame. Blake was so certain of the worth of his work, the truth and grandeur of his visions, that public recognition – though doubtless it would have been welcome – was not essential to him.

But what would we make of William Blake today? I don’t know about you, but if a neighbour buttonholed me one day and began to tell me that he’d recently been talking to John Milton – ‘I have seen him as a youth. And as an old man with a long flowing beard. He came lately as an old man’ – well, I might tend to back off. It is eccentric and odd to see angels, and it’s hard to blame Blake’s acquaintances for their scepticism which in turn fostered their general sense that he was a man who should not really be taken seriously.

The Great Red Dragon & The Woman Clothed in the Sun

We make exceptions for genius with the benefit of hindsight. With the weight of a century or so of bolstering critical opinion, we all now recognise that William Blake was a genius, and so we suspend our disbelief about his visions. Who knows what a genius may or may not see? Perhaps we consider that, as an artist as well as a poet, Blake’s visual imagination produced images so vivid, so concrete, that in some way they did indeed ‘appear’ before him. Perhaps, as Peter Ackroyd suggests early in his book, the faculty of eidetic imagery, fairly common in children who see hallucinatory images as genuine sensory perceptions, was retained by Blake throughout his life.

Or perhaps he did see angels? What does it mean to say you see angels?

At any rate, this is a man who sang – and drew a picture of his wife – on his deathbed. “‘Stay Kate,’ he said, ‘keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me.’” His friend George Richmond (the artist who later drew the flattering portrait head of Charlotte Bronte) wrote to Samuel Palmer,

“He died on Sunday night at 6 Oclock in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see and expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and He burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.”

Or, as Blake himself wrote in ‘The Four Zoas’,

‘…he shook his aged mantles off
Into the fires Then glorious bright Exulting in his joy
He sounding rose into the heavens in naked majesty
In radiant youth.’

Albion