Joseph Viscomi

Blake’s masterpiece of printmaking comprises a series of 22 prints engraved in pure line without preliminary etching. Created in 1826, these were based on the artist’s watercolours of the same subject from 1806 (Morgan Library, New York) and 1821 (Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard). Unlike these watercolours, the prints have complex marginal decorations that comment on the biblical text. Ruskin remarked that the work ‘is of the highest rank in certain characters of imagination and expression; in the mode of obtaining certain effects of light it will also prove a very useful example to you. In expressing conditions of glaring and flickering light, Blake is greater than Rembrandt.’

An in-depth examination of William Blake’s glorious and acclaimed series of twelve monoprints Among William Blake’s (1757–1827) most widely recognized and highly regarded works as an artist are twelve color printed drawings, or monoprints, conceived and executed in 1795. This book investigates these masterworks, explaining Blake’s technique—one he essentially reinvented, unaware of 17th-century precursors—to show that these works were produced as paintings, and played a crucial role in Blake’s development as a painter. Using material and historical analyses, Joseph Viscomi argues that the monoprints were created as autonomous paintings rather than as illustrations for Blake’s books with an intended viewing order. Enlivened with bountiful illustrations, the text approaches the works within the context of their time, not divorced from ideas expressed in Blake’s writings but not illustrative of or determined by those writings.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art