William blake and the art of engraving

Th e principal elements of my argument concern the current debate surrounding William Blake’s niques of relief etching and engraving and their context in the survival of the important, y

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE ART OF

ENGRAVING

The History of the Book

Series Editor: Ann R Hawkins

Titles in this Series

1 Conservatism and the Quarterly Review: A Critical Analysis

Jonathan Cutmore (ed.)

2 Contributors to the Quarterly Review: A History, 1809–1825

Jonathan Cutmore (ed.)

3 Wilkie Collins’s American Tour, 1873–1874

Susan R Hanes

Forthcoming TitlesNegotiated Knowledge: Medical Periodical Publishing in Scotland, 1733–

1832

Fiona A Macdonald

On Paper: Th e Description and Analysis of Handmade Laid Paper

R Carter Hailey

Reading in History: New Methodologies from the Anglo-American Tradition

Bonnie Gunzenhauser (ed.)

Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine: Metropolitan Muse

Simon Hull

www.pickeringchatto.com/historyoft hebook

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE ART OF

ENGRAVING

by Mei-Ying Sung

londonPICKERING & CHATTO

2009

© Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2009

© Mei-Ying Sung, 2009British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Sung, Mei-Ying

William Blake and the art of engraving – (Th e history of the book)

1 Blake, William, 1757–1827 – Criticism and interpretation

I Title

769.9’2

ISBN-13: 9781851969586

21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH

2252 Ridge Road, Brookfi eld, Vermont 05036-9704, USA

www.pickeringchatto.com

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise

without prior permission of the publisher

∞

Th is publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials

Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Abbreviation vi

Acknowledgements viiiIntroduction 1

1 Th e History of the Th eory of Conception and Execution 19

5 Blake’s Virgil Woodcuts and the Earliest Re-engravers 141Conclusion 165Notes 169

Index 211

– vi –

ABBREVIATIONS

Locations & Collections:

Beinecke: Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven CT, USA

Bodley: Bodleian Library, Oxford University

BL: British Library, London

BM: British Museum, London

BMPD: British Museum, Prints & Drawings Room

Cleverdon: Douglas Cleverdon private collection

ESSICK: Robert Essick’s collection, Los Angeles CA, USA (to diff erentiate from Essick’s

works)

FMC: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Fogg: Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University, Boston MA, USA

Houghton: Houghton Library, Harvard University, Boston MA, USA

Huntington: Huntington Library, San Marino CA, USA

Leeds: Brotherton Library, Leeds University

Lewis Walpole: Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Yale University, CT, USA

McGill: McGill University, Montreal, Canada

NGA: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA

Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada

Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia PA, USA

PM: Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, USA

Tate: Tate Gallery, London

Texas: University of Texas, Austin TX, USA

V&A: Victoria & Albert Museum, London

YCBA: Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven CT, USA

YUAG: Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven CT, USA

References:

BIQ: Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, ed Morris Eaves and Morton D Paley, published

under the support of Department of English, University of Rochester

E: Erdman, David V., (ed.) Th e Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, New York,

London: Doubleday, 1988 (revised edition of 1982 and 1965).

– vii –

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Copper plate verso and the print from its recto on silk, An gorical subject showing eight young girls circling a woman seated among clouds 56 Figure 2: Blake’s Job copper plate, Plate 7, recto 95

alle-Figure 3: Blake Job copper plate, Plate 7, verso 96

Figure 4: Blake’s Job copper plate, Plate 11, recto 101

Figure 5: Blake’s Job copper plate, Plate 16, verso 106Figure 6: Plate maker’s mark on the copper plate verso of the title page of

– viii –

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Th e research of this book extends from my PhD thesis (Nottingham Trent University, 2005) Th e sequential outcome has been delivered in several con-ferences in the last few years It started from a joint paper with David Worrall,

‘A Reconsideration of the Execution and Conception: Th e Evidence of Blake’s

Job Copperplates,’ presented in the conference ‘Friendly Enemies: Blake and the

Enlightenment’ at Essex University (2000) It has become the core of this book Another paper, ‘Th e Experiments of Colour Printing and Blake Studies,’ pre-sented at the ‘Blake Symposium: Large Colour Prints’ at Tate Britain (2002) has developed into another chapter ‘Blake’s Copper Plates’ was presented at Tate Britain for ‘William Blake at Work’ (2004), a conference mainly concerned the conservation scientists’ work on Blake ‘A Virgil Woodcut aft er Blake,’ presented

at the ‘Blake at 250’ Conference, York University (2007), was also the outline of

a chapter in this book

In terms of funding, the research and completion of this book has to thank the Overseas Research Student Award from the Universities UK in paying a part of

my PhD tuition fees and supporting my project of examining Blake’s Job copper

plates in the British Museum A trip in 2002 to the United States, the Houghton Library (Harvard University), Yale University Art Gallery, and National Art Gallery (Washington DC) to examine Blake’s other original copper plates, was supported by a Stephen Copley Award from the British Association of Roman-tic Studies and research funding from St Mary’s College, Twickenham, research funding In 2003, the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art approved my project

of visiting the Beinecke Library (Yale University) to examine a newly

rediscov-ered set of Job proofs with their research support grants Partly with St Mary’s

College research funding, I was also able to visit the Bodleian Library (Oxford

University) to examine Blake’s early Richard Gough plates and W E Moss’s

manuscripts, the Brotherton Library (Leeds University) for Ruthven Todd’s

manuscripts, and Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) for Blake’s Job proofs and the electrotypes of the Songs Th e Eleanor M Garvey Fellowship in Printing and Graphic Arts from the Houghton Library, Harvard University (2006-07) ena-bled me to study 200 or so printing copperplates in their collection In 2008, the BSA-ASECS Fellowship for Bibliographical Studies in the Eighteenth Century

from the Bibliographical Society of America, and the UK Printing Historical Society Grant also supported me with further research in this book

Th anks to Angela Roche and Antony Griffi ths at the Department of Prints &

Drawings, British Museum, permission to take photographs of Job copper plates

was granted Kind permissions to photograph for study purposes Blake’s and his contemporaries’ copper plates were given by the Prints & Drawings Room in the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Art Gallery, Washington DC, and Yale University Art Gallery Generous help has been given by Craig Hartley at Prints and Drawings of Fitzwilliam Museum, Alan Jutzi at the Ahmanson Room of Huntington Library, and all the staff in the Rare Books Room of British Library, the Beinecke Library, the Rare Books of Bodleian Library, the Special Material

of Brotherton Library, Fogg Museum of Art, Houghton Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Preston Library at Westminster Archive, St Bride’s Printing Library, Tate Britain, the National Art Library at V&A, and Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut Particular warm thanks are

to all the friendly staff at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, and the Houghton Library, Harvard University, especially Hope Mayo and Caroline Duroselle-Melish, the curators of Printing and Graphic Arts, for giving me the most delightful experience of examining the uncatalogued (hence unknown to the public) copperplates in the Houghton collection

My personal thanks are to Professor Christopher Todd for sending me as a

stranger a list of his father’s works, Ruthven Todd (1914-1978): A preliminary

fi nding-list (2001) Professor Ian Short’s warm friendship came at my most

helpless time in UCL My photographer friend Amingo (Yu-Ming Tsau) took

photographs of the Job copper plates for me Professor Robert Essick gave me

the opportunity to see his great Blake collection and information about them

Dr Steve Clark and Dr Keri Davies generously gave me numerous and very useful information, support and help in the process of my research My deep gratefulness is to Professor Edward Larrissy for his support and countless refer-ences for my research applications

I would also like to pay tribute to Professor Robert N Essick for his great contributions to Blake studies and generosity as a collector Much the same, Professor G E Bentley Jr.’s monumental works on Blake and his kind encourage-ment and suggestions to my PhD thesis are precious to me

Finally, my most deep-hearted appreciation is for David Worrall and my ents, Ping-Yuan Sung and Ying-Mei Chung, as well as all my family in Taiwan, who give me everlasting support in every way Th is book is dedicated to them

par-Grantham UK, 2008

– 1 –

INTRODUCTION: THE TECHNICAL

ARGUMENT

Th is introductory chapter is intended to announce the scope of this project and

to give an indication of the range of issues it will discuss Th e principal elements

of my argument concern the current debate surrounding William Blake’s niques of relief etching and engraving and their context in the survival of the important, yet neglected, archives of his original copper plates in major muse-ums and art galleries

tech-One of the reasons for the neglect of Blake’s copper plates is that nearly all modern scholars interested in Blake’s printing techniques have focused on his relief etching while ignoring his engraving Th is is due to a relative devaluation

of the technique of engraving which is oft en regarded as an obsolete means of reproduction and which was replaced by other techniques during the nineteenth century Paradoxically, modern Blake scholarship on engraving has reproduced

the very arguments about its low aesthetic valuation which Blake’s Public Address

(1810) did so much to refute With their concentration on etching rather than engraving, notable scholars such as Robert N Essick, Michael Phillips and Joseph Viscomi may have worked with a contrary emphasis to much of what

Blake had to say in the Public Address, his most elaborated discussion of the role

of engraving amongst the fi ne arts.1

Although there have been well-defi ned competing interpretative theories

about the literary aspects of Blake’s works (e.g David Erdman versus rop Frye, historicism versus proto-structuralism), nothing has generated so

North-much controversy as academic discussion about Blake’s artistic processes Th e chief aspects of the arguments have gathered around the production of the illuminated books, particularly those produced between 1789 and 1795, and Blake’s use of relief etching and colour printing Nowhere are these encounters between competing views of techniques made more apparent than in the cata-logue and content of the Tate Britain Blake exhibition held in the year 2000, co-curated by Michael Phillips and Robin Hamlyn, and made accessible by its

associated catalogue, William Blake (2000) Some of the more controversial

suggestions included in the exhibition concerning Blake’s methods of colour

printing were further elaborated in Phillips’s book, William Blake: Th e tion of the Songs fr om Manuscript to Illuminated Printing (2000) Publication

Crea-of Phillips’s book led to a riposte Crea-off ered in an article by Essick and Viscomi

published in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 35:3 (Winter 2002), and in their

elaborate online edition of the same essay, ‘An Inquiry into William Blake’s Method of Color Printing’ (http://www.blakequarterly.org).2 Perhaps some-thing of the heat of the debate is characterized by the title of former Tate curator and Blake editor Martin Butlin’s essay in the same journal, ‘“Is Th is

a Private War or Can Anyone Join In?”: A Plea for a Broader Look at Blake’s Color-Printing Techniques’ With hardly any compromise or mediated con-clusion being reached, the argument about process was further complicated

by Butlin’s support of Phillips’s theory in his essay ‘Word as Image in William

Blake’ published in Romanticism and Millenarianism.3 In the issue of Blake:

An Illustrated Quarterly containing Butlin’s essay, there are also G E Bentley

and Alexander Gourlay’s reviews of Phillips’s book as a part of the versy Th is ongoing debate demonstrates the importance of the issue about Blake’s reproductive techniques and printing processes and the profi le of the academic currency amongst some of the most distinguished Blake scholars in recent times Not least, the public aspects of the Tate exhibition brought the controversy before tens of thousands of visitors, irrespective of whether they perused the accompanying catalogue.4

contro-Th e core issue between Phillips on the one hand, and Essick and Viscomi

on the other, is whether Blake used a ‘one-pull’ method or ‘two-pull’ process

to print in colour his relief etched copper plates for the illuminated books In other words, their debate is about printing rather than about etching or engrav-ing although, as I will argue below, the techniques Blake used in producing his copper printing plates are the fundamental underlying basis for the production

of all the prints produced from them, by whatever means, and by whatever ing method In other words, not only has there been a tendency for engraving to become subsumed under the category of etching, both of these techniques have become less closely scrutinized than Blake’s printing methods Th e exhibition of Blake in the Tate Britain from November 2000 to February 2001 aroused much

print-controversy for its central section, ‘Th e Furnace of Lambeth’s Vale: Blake’s Studio

and his World,’ the part of the exhibition understood to be organized by the exhibition co-curator, Michael Phillips As Essick and Viscomi write, ‘in 2000,

… printing techniques rose to the forefront of attention among the small band of scholars interested in how Blake made his books as the material foundation for interpretations of what they mean’.5 Despite the words ‘small band of scholars’, these include the most infl uential and currently best-known leading authorities

in the study of Blake’s art For example, one of the disputants is Martin Butlin,

the scholar whose two volume catalogue raisonné, Th e Paintings and Drawings of

William Blake (1981) is the necessary handbook for all studies of Blake’s art As

an art historian and (now retired) senior curator, Butlin is regarded as tative with his eye very much on artistic techniques and so his entry into the debate is a crucial indicator of the signifi cance of the controversy Phillips is sim-ilarly a well established bibliographic and historicist scholar of Blake works Just

authori-as Bentley’s Blake Records (1969), Blake Records Supplement (1988), Blake Books (1977) and Blake Books Supplement (1995) are essential for every Blake student,

in much the same way, the meticulous historical and material studies of Essick and Viscomi have established highly regarded reputations in the same fi eld, with their work being based on material evidence with wide-ranging and historically empirical scholarship Moreover, with their exceptional experience in printmak-ing, Essick, Viscomi and Phillips combine their specialities in literary discussion with practical experimentation, producing a kind of reconstructive archaeology

of Blake’s printmaking techniques

Phillips, in the exhibition and in his contribution to its catalogue, William Blake (2000), as well as in his book, Th e Creation of the Songs (2000), advocated

a ‘two-pull’ theory without arguing or even mentioning the earlier ‘one-pull’ theory substantially presented by Essick (1980, 1989) and Viscomi (1993)

As the latter two writers point out, ‘the two-pull theory is described [by lips] in a straightforward manner that implies it is a generally accepted fact.’6Indeed, there was signifi cant omission of the relevance of the arguments of Essick and Viscomi in the Blake exhibition at the Tate Britain Visitors to the exhibition and purchasers of the catalogue were not made aware of the compet-ing interpretation of technique put forward in Essick and Viscomi’s work Th e

Phil-‘one-pull’ theory represented by Essick and Viscomi assumes that Blake printed his illuminated books by passing the inked text and coloured image through the rolling press simultaneously, in one pass Both Essick and Viscomi carried out their experiments of relief etching in an attempt at reconstructing Blake’s print-ing methods, and argued against their precursor Ruthven Todd’s theory (1948) that Blake used transfer techniques (Essick 1980, ch 9; Viscomi 1993, ch 1)

Viscomi’s Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993) received great attention from

Blake scholars during the 1990s, and is still regarded as a seminal work on Blake’s techniques Indeed, there can be no doubting the contribution to Blake stud-ies made by Essick and Viscomi Th eir work is founded on a practical emphasis

on empirical evidence drawn from reconstructive printmaking techniques allied

to a profound knowledge of the range of Blake’s works However, neither the section ‘Blake’s Illuminated Printing’, written by Phillips in the Tate Britain

exhibition catalogue, nor his British Library monograph study, Th e Creation of the Songs (2000), refers to Essick’s or Viscomi’s theories Not only does Phillips

display a multistage process of relief etching on the copper plate,7 but he also posits a multistage method of colour printing achieved by passing the etched

copper plate through the press more than once to print text and image rately using an accurate process of registration.8 Again, the public status aff orded

sepa-by the Tate Britain exhibition, accompanied sepa-by the eminence in bibliographic study implied by the British Library imprint makes the exclusion of a consider-able body of alternative research endeavour all the more signifi cant Not least, although it may prove to be only of tangential relevance to the discussion of printmaking, the Blake Tate Britain exhibition – and its catalogue – is bound to become a standard reference point for establishing matters of both provenance

and economic value It is safe to predict that, as this is one of their major modus operandi in estimating the market, the Tate catalogue will in future be frequently

used by dealers, auctioneers and the public and private collectors whom they serve

Again, it is important to stress the intensity of the scholarly debate the Tate Blake exhibition engendered and how hard fought were the attempts by all par-ties to establish the validity of empirical evidence based upon competing studies

of Blake’s extant artefacts Th e evidence Phillips provides in Th e Creation of the Songs (2000) includes the pinholes he claimed existed on some copies of Blake’s Songs for the purpose of registration during printing, and the printed word

‘1794’ which shows up beneath colour printing under ultraviolet on Songs of Experience Copy T (Ottawa), as well as the mis-registered Nurses Song in Songs

of Experience Copy E (Huntington) Studying pinholes, like counting angels on

pinheads, may appear irretrievably recondite yet it alludes to a technique for establishing accurate registration for multi-pull printing Even in today’s technol-ogies of computerized printing, accurate registration to ensure separate colours

or images do not blur by being misaligned still remains a challenge Pinholes through which string was pulled to exactly align multi-pull printings, prevent-ing the paper in the press from moving relative to the printing surface, was quite conceivably a technique Blake used Indeed, such a technique may be alluded

to in William M Ivins, Jr’s manuscript comments in the Houghton Library,

Harvard University, discussing William Savage’s printing methods in Practical Hints on Decorative Printing (1822), one of the more notorious of the early nine-

teenth-century experimenters in colour printing. However, upon examination – and as was evident at the exhibition itself – the so-called ‘pin-holes’ proved

to be merely inkblots and Phillips subsequently published a retraction of this

component of his evidence base in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly Similarly,

it needed Alexander Gourlay’s review of the exhibition in the same journal to make it clear that (with the exception of a single Blake’s original copper plate

from Illustrations of the Book of Job), the copper plates on exhibit were made

not by reconstructive etching techniques but by photogravure, a photographic facsimile technique used in this case by Michael Phillips and Christopher Bacon,

a printmaker known through his work for the Th omas Bewick Birthplace Trust established in 1982.

In Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 35:3 (2002), Essick and Viscomi

illus-trated new experiments arguing against Phillips and defending their earlier theories in the essay, ‘An Inquiry into William Blake’s Method of Color Print-ing’ Th eir experiments were to print from electrotypes using both one-pull and two-pull methods to show their diff erences, also using the aid of devices such

as magnifi cation and Adobe PhotoShop computer soft ware to reveal colours in detail on Blake’s prints Th e motive behind these detailed experiments was to argue against every point of Phillips’s theory and to insist that Blake’s printing method is ‘one-pull’ and no other (except in the possible case of ‘Nurses Song’

in the Songs of Experience Copy E, Huntington) Th ese scientifi c methods and empirical experiments present strong evidence to support Essick and Viscomi’s earlier arguments

Taking together Phillips’s ‘Correction’ essay, Butlin’s article supporting lips, Essick and Viscomi’s co-authored response, and mixing these with Bentley’s and Gourlay’s reviews, one can say that no other publication marks the peak

Phil-of the controversy about Blake’s printing methods more than this single issue

of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 36:2 (Winter 2002) Of course there were

also less partisan reviews of the Tate Britain Blake exhibition and its catalogue

by Morton Paley (2002) and Jason Whittaker (2002), which followed in the wake of these controversies In other words, at least eight of the most eminent contemporary Blake scholars were engaged in an increasingly heated debate, not about the interpretation of imagery or poetry but quite simply about techni-cal process Indeed, aft er 2002 the controversy arguably intensifi ed still further with Martin Butlin’s online response ‘William Blake, S W Hayter and Color Printing’ (2003), Essick and Viscomi’s replies on the same website10 as well as

Phillips’s most recent essay on Blake’s printing of the sole surviving America: A Prophecy (1793) plate fragment.

Curiously, despite the febrile academic controversies described above, a tor which has been absent is the close examination of Blake’s original copper plates Th e arguments of all the scholars referred to above rely on evidence based upon an examination of prints to the neglect of the thirty-eight engraved copper plates made by Blake which are still in existence, and in particular the twenty-

fac-two copper plates for Illustrations of the Book of Job My PhD thesis, ‘Technical and Material Studies of William Blake’s Engraved Illustrations of the Book of Job

(1826)’ (2005),which this book is based on,was the fi rst to examine the rial evidence of the extant copper printing plates To those who have studied

mate-Joseph Viscomi’s Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993) with its

groundbreak-ing evidence that Blake’s illuminated books were printed in editions and not

ad hoc, customer by customer, the neglect of Blake’s original plates may be

sur-prising While their existence has sometimes been noted in passing, my study is the fi rst to analyze them in detail and to present the evidence they aff ord On the face of it, this may seem an odd absence in Blake studies which, as has been shown, is a research fi eld demonstrably amongst the most vigorously contested in Romantic studies Similarly, contemporary critical investment in studying Blake’s prints made by relief-etching, the basis of the illuminated books of poetry, has been accomplished at the cost of neglecting his engraving, the technique which required greater professional skill and dexterity than etching Not least, as Blake’s extant printing plates are physically robust and represent the artist’s last personal contact with the source of his images – very much an exemplar of a Romantic ide-ology of the artist – the neglect of the printing plates is all the more surprising.

It is only very recently that Blake scholars have begun to notice the tance of his extant engraved copper plates Following some time aft er my fi rst paper on this subject, ‘A Reconsideration of the Execution and Conception: Th e

impor-Evidence of Blake’s Job Copper Plates,’ presented at the ‘Friendly Enemies: Blake

and the Enlightenment’ conference at Essex University (August 2000), there has been increasing attention paid to Blake’s copper plates Publications in the public domain include Michael Phillips’s ‘Th e Printing of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job,’ Print Quarterly, 12:2 (2005), and G E Bentley’s ‘Blake’s Heavy

Metal: Th e History, Weight, Uses, Cost, and Makers of His Copper Plates,’ versity of Toronto Quarterly, 76: 2 (Spring 2007).11

Uni-At this point it may be helpful to summarize the extent of the known archive

of Blake copper plates Th ere are thirty-nine known and traceable printing per plates by Blake in existence, including thirty-two exclusively made by Blake and seven cooperative plates made by Blake and others Th e thirty-two copper

cop-plates solely executed by Blake include a fragment of one etched plate, the ica cancelled plate a (NGA Washington DC) and thirty-one engraved plates

Amer-Th ese are the single plates of the Chaucers Canterbury Pilgrims (Yale sity Art Gallery), Th e Beggar’s Opera aft er Hogarth (Houghton, Harvard), seven plates for the Illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy (NGA Washington DC) and the twenty-two Illustrations of the Book of Job plates (BMPD) (See Figure 1) In addition, there are six plates for Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments (Bodley, Oxford) and the single plate Christ Trampling on Satan (Pierpont Morgan, New York), partially engraved by Blake Among them, only the etched plate America a

Univer-has received scholarly attention before 2000 Perhaps because of the critical and cultural capital invested within university English Literature departments, only the single surviving fragment of one of Blake’s illuminated books of poetry – a few centimetres across – has been thoroughly analysed

Th is plate, known as America a (which is actually only a fragment from Blake’s

original piece of copper), has been examined, measured in detail, electrotyped, reprinted and experimented on in diff erent ways (including some attempts at

reconstructive printing) over a fi ft y-year period by W E Moss, Ruthven Todd, William Hayter, Robert Essick, Joseph Viscomi and Michael Phillips.12 Despite all of these experiments, this piece of copper plate has not been investigated for its own sake as also suggesting a body of possible evidence about Blake’s other techniques, but simply for furthering the project of the reconstructive recovery

of his method of relief etching For example, the deep gouge on the recto, and the engraving on its verso (possibly by Th omas Butts Jr) has not been properly explained or examined In Chapter 2, I will show that these marks are those of

the corrective technique of repoussage, a practice found in abundance on the Job

copper plates (see Figure 2) Equally remarkably, none of the other thirty-one engraved plates by Blake has received the equivalent attention given to the single surviving etched plate fragment, with the possible exception of where, as with Blake’s plate aft er Hogarth located at the Houghton, modern restrikes have been taken (and have now found their way onto the print dealer market) Moreover,

apart from the recently resurfaced Christ Trampling on Satan,13 there is an even more ready scholarly dismissal of the possible signifi cance of six further copper

plates, among four hundred for Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments (1786),

which are only conjecturally attributed to Blake Th ey have been left neglected

in the storerooms of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and for many years ignored

by most Blake scholars

Although there was a short revival of interest in the technique in the late nine-teenth century, engraving has lost its golden age forever and has been abandoned

by most modern printmakers By contrast, the less exacting medium of etching has won many modern artists’ favour and has been regarded as a free means of innovative creation Th e rise of etching, and the comparable fall of interest in engraving, has infl uenced Blake studies in a subtle way, one not always made explicit to Blake students

It has also been less well understood that the group of twentieth-century scholars interested in Blake’s printmaking techniques themselves had a number

of connections with modern artistic circles, either by directly cooperating with artists or practising printmaking themselves Graham Robertson, who discusses

Blake’s colour printing methods in his edition of Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake

(1907), was an artist himself as well as being a principal benefactor of the Tate Gallery, London, where he bequeathed most of its important Blake collection,

including the best known version of the iconic print, Newton (1795).14 ven Todd, the mid-twentieth-century Blake scholar, who is arguably Essick and Viscomi’s most direct precursor, had a close association with Surrealist artists

Ruth-in the 1930s and 40s Todd’s experiments on Blake’s prRuth-intRuth-ing and relief etchRuth-ing were made in cooperation with William Hayter (1901–1988) and Joan Miró

(1893–1983), two eminent Surrealist artists Essick, Viscomi and Phillips all have experience in practical printmaking and experimenting on Blake’s making

of relief etching and printing Th e latter two refer directly to their experiences as

artistic printmakers in their books, Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993) and Th e Creation of the Songs (2000) Of course, the artistic background of these schol-

ars has substantially assisted their study of Blake’s techniques, helping validate their carefully formulated – if contrary – interpretations However, they have also been less obviously – but nevertheless profoundly – infl uenced by modern artistic judgements about comparative value within their professional fi elds as university tutors of English literature Th e focus on Blake’s relief etching to the neglect of his engraved copper plates is a signifi cant consequence of an attach-ment to the processes which resulted in the illuminated books becoming works crucial to the position of Blake’s poetry within the English literary canon.Most of the scholars interested in Blake’s techniques are also, even if to vary-ing degrees, collectors of his original works Graham Robertson, W E Moss, Ruthven Todd, Geoff rey Keynes, Robert Essick and Michael Phillips were or are all collectors of Blake’s works Even one of the least well-known collectors from this group, Ruthven Todd, owned a receipt signed by Blake to Th omas Butts,

9 September 1806,15 Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826) Plates 20 and 21,16

and fi ve of Blake’s separate plates: Th e Fall of Rosamond (1783),17 John Caspar Lavater (1787),18 Christ Trampling on Satan (c 1806–8),19 Th e Man Sweeping the Interpreter’s Parlour (c 1822)20 and all four states of Wilson Lowry (1824–

5).21 Although implying himself to be fi nancially precarious in a wartime letter

to Graham Robertson, Todd still managed to acquire this small but important Blake collection.22 Between them, Robertson, Moss, Keynes and Essick have also owned, sold-on or bequeathed a number of crucial Blake pictures, books and artefacts Recently, Michael Phillips – not without controversy on account of their unproven authenticity – exhibited three items from his own collection in the Blake Tate exhibition (2000), which he claimed contain Blake’s authenticated drawing or writing.23 Considering that he entitled one of his most celebrated and

striking illuminated books Milton: A Poem (1804–20), one of these items, an

1732 Richard Bentley edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost alleged to be copiously

annotated with marginalia by Blake, stands to be an undoubtedly signifi cant

fi nd if authenticated However, like the Phillips-owned so-called ‘Sophocles

notebook,’ the attribution to Blake of the Paradise Lost annotations has been

critically challenged, notwithstanding their exhibition at both Tate Britain and, subsequently, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.24 Further evidence, perhaps in the form of refi nements in the technological investigation of graphic authenticity, must be awaited before these disputes are resolved one way or the other but there can be no doubting that the dual roles of collector and critic

require some measure of caution when interpreting the subsequent hermeneutic

of Blake’s work which results

Th e slightly parochial nature of the academic contestation – even if played out in the exhibition halls of the major international galleries – is a reminder that the interpretative high ground in the judgement of commercial and artistic value involves an untidy melee of public benefactors, private collectors, university aca-demics and museum curators together with, not least, the exclusively recondite world of dealers and auction houses, a profession not unacquainted with crimi-nal convictions in recent years (for example, in the case of Sotheby’s chairman

Alfred Taubman convicted of illegal price fi xing, see Th e Times, 23 April 2002)

Th e interest and demand for Blake’s relief etchings raises their prices on the ketplace, therefore encouraging a hierarchical judgement of his art Although there is an understandable reluctance to admit the hierarchical view of artistic technique, modern Blake scholars appear to always bear in mind that engraving

mar-as a reproductive technique is signifi cantly less valuable than etching, which is seen as a better method of revealing an artist’s creativity in printmaking In other words, by processes of either commission or omission, modern Blake scholars have been complicit in under-privileging Blake’s technique as an engraver

In fact, the decline in esteem of engraving started in Blake’s lifetime Th e engravers’ dilemma was whether to consider themselves commercial or high artists Many scholars have discussed the exclusion of engravers from the Royal Academy of Arts.25 As D W Dörrbecker (1994) points out, Robert Strange’s

Inquiry into the Rise and Establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts (1775) and John Landseer’s Lectures on the art of Engraving (1807) represent the engrav-

er’s protests against this discrimination Th e notion of originality grew stronger through the nineteenth century26 and, by the twentieth century, innovation and originality became the core for the judgement of artistic value Modern Blake studies refl ect this evolution of the judgement of art Certainly, Blake’s

Job engravings were already highly admired by his contemporaries, even during

the lengthy process of their execution.27 Th e nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin regarded them as Blake’s best work,28 but the original copper plates have been under-examined in modern times By contrast, because Blake’s illuminated books are today held in higher critical esteem, research into processes of relief etching and printing from relief etched plates has been pursued with the most noticeable vigour To complete the paradox, etching is a technique which (then

as now) is less skilful than engraving, arguably less a measure of Blake’s command

of his craft technique

Th e term ‘original print’, distinguished from reproductive engraving, is attributed in the late nineteenth century to works of printmakers such as Dürer

to defi ne the prints made from the engraver’s own design.29 Blake’s Job falls into

this category, and deserves the same attention as his relief etching However,

the traditional technique of engraving to which it applies is somewhat

deval-ued and so Blake’s Job has come to be regarded by modern scholars, perhaps

dismissively, as a ‘middle ground’30 between reproductive engraving and original relief etching Th is hierarchical judgement of artistic value, although perfectly understandable once it has been historicized, has caused an unjustifi ed neglect

of Blake’s engraved copper plates



Among the extant copper plates of Blake, the twenty-two Job plates in the British

Museum Prints and Drawings (hereaft er BMPD) should be considered the most important material for investigation Th is is not only because of the substantial

number of the copper plates, but also because the Job plates are the most complete

set that was made late in Blake’s life, they have the added scholarly attraction of having been the subject of well-documented records kept by the Linnell family While other completed plates might have involved other hands in engraving or

restoration, the Job plates are the best evidence of Blake’s technique untouched

by others, thanks to John Linnell’s retention of them prior to their safe ership by the British Museum from 1918 Of the others, the Dante plates are unfi nished; the six Gough plates were executed during Blake’s apprenticeship cooperatively in Basire’s workshop and so are probably not entirely his work;

own-Christ Trampling on Satan was engraved by Th omas Butts Jr with the assistance

of Blake; the Hogarth plate was repaired by later commercial printers.31 A later

impression of this last plate, in Th e Works of William Hogarth, fr om the nal Plates Restored by James Heath was published in 1822 by Baldwin, Cradock

Origi-and Joy Essick suggests that James Heath probably executed some work on the fourth state (1822).32 Th e Hogarth plate was also ‘thoroughly repaired by Rat-cliff , of Birmingham’.33 In other words, the current state of the Hogarth copper plate does not contain Blake’s exclusive handiwork Th e large plate of Chaucers Canterbury Pilgrims is perhaps the second most important copper plate worth

taking into account as being representative of Blake’s technique and skill, except

that its solitary status cannot compare with the twenty-two Job plates However, despite the importance of the Job designs recognized by Linnell, the Job copper

plates themselves have been paid little attention aft er they were deposited in the BMPD, and it is surprisingly easy to document this scholarly neglect

In all the past studies of Blake except the two recent essays by Phillips (2005)

and Bentley (2007) mentioned earlier, the Job copper plates have only been

men-tioned by a few scholars in very brief accounts Keynes mentions the existence of

Blake’s copper plates in a short article in his Blake Studies but adds no description

or other examination.34 Bentley noticed the two reused copper plates, Plates 14

and 16, in the Job series, and deduced that they were reused plates formerly used for A Practical Treatise of Husbandry (1759),35 a work published when Blake

was only two years old Bo Lindberg’s William Blake’s Illustrations to the Book

of Job (1973), which is a combination of material, historical studies and

icono-graphic interpretations, and usually thought to be the most exhaustive study on the subject, mentions and provides the British Museum location data for the plates but otherwise completely ignores them However, Lindberg’s chapter on

the engraving technique is not based on an examination of the Job copper plates

themselves although he was obviously aware of their existence Aft er Lindberg’s

book, William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, edited by David Bindman

(London: William Blake Trust, 1987), is the most recent and ambitious work

intended to cover all the materials available for the study on Blake’s Job

engrav-ings However, it includes only a small section, written by Essick, on the copper plates which contains information (which can now be updated in the light of the evidence presented here) concerning ‘chisel marks’ on their backs, supposing that these marks were made during planishing, the process of hammering metal plates to make them fl at and hard before engraving.36 Lindberg’s interpretations were made without the foundation of close material study and demonstrate the extent of the neglect of these copper plates Th is amounts to the absence from scrutiny of the most basic material in these studies, namely the plates themselves, and it very largely accounts for the consequent tradition of misinterpretation



Th e neglect of Blake’s engraved copper plates has also resulted from the extensive elaboration of an expressly literary theory, the notion of the unifi cation of inven-tion or conception and execution, largely pursued by Essick and Viscomi Th e theory, developed from the ‘one-pull’ theory of printing, is sought specifi cally

to correspond to Blake’s claims for divine inspiration in his creative processes Essick and Viscomi imply that Blake realized his theory of unifying invention and execution as a result of his practice of printmaking Th e key statements for our understanding of how their argument emerged come from Blake’s own statements that ‘Invention depends Altogether upon Execution or Organiza-

tion’ (E 637) in his annotations to Reynolds’s Discourses, and his antipathy to

‘the pretended Philosophy which teaches that Execution is the power of One

& Invention of Another’ (E 699) Th e unity of invention and execution, hand and mind working as one, implies a ‘spontaneous’ and ‘immediate’ process of creation.37 Th is takes literally Blake’s own description in a letter to Th omas Butts

of writing a ‘Poem from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or

thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against [his] Will’ (E 729)

Essick and Viscomi found that the best example of Blake’s unity of invention and execution is his direct use of the etching needle or brush to compose text and design on the copper plate without models Essick claims:

Blake’s unique method of relief etching provided a medium for his most radical experiments in the interweaving of graphic conception and execution within a seam- less process of production Rather than transferring a design prepared in a diff erent medium to the copper, the relief etcher can compose directly on the plate 38

Viscomi says, ‘illuminated printing represents undivided labor, unifi ed tion and execution, and unconventional production’,39 and claims that Blake’s

inven-‘working without models’ in relief etching is ‘a composing process that enabled Blake to put his thoughts down on copper immediately’.40

Essick and Viscomi endeavour to prove that Blake designed and drew directly onto the copper plate without transferring from models Directly designing on copper plate is like drawing and painting on canvas, thus unifying invention and execution.41 For Essick and Viscomi, it is in the same way that Blake’s supposed one-pull procedure of printing unifi es invention and execution by colouring and printing in one go without separating this stage of the process into mechanical divisions

However, engraving does not fi t into this method or the theory which is

at the core of what Essick and Viscomi argue Th e reason why engraving does not fi t this theory is that engraving nearly always requires models and transfer techniques and, in any case, the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ process of moving the engrav-er’s burin is quite contrary to the fl uent sketching with the etching needle, or writing with a brush dipped in acid-proof liquid In an even greater distinction between the production processes of the illuminated books, even though they

used Blake’s original design, the Job engravings were printed by another hand, the

professional copper plate printers Lahee and Dixon Th e division of invention

and execution, as far as the printing of the Job plates is concerned, could hardly

be greater In other words, the paradigm of etching employed by Essick and comi, while it may hold true for the illuminated books, cannot be followed in

Vis-the engraved Illustrations of Vis-the Book of Job, a work printed by commercial copper

plate printers

As will be discussed in Chapter 3, a major part of this study, close

examina-tion on Blake’s copper plates, especially on the Job plates, reveals for the fi rst time that the technique of repoussage was extensively used by Blake on the versos

of the copper plates to mend wrongly engraved lines Th is is a very signifi cant

fi nding As described in handbooks of printmaking, the technique of repoussage

is used to correct serious mistakes occurring on line engraved copper plates by scraping and burnishing the lines and hammering up the area from the back of the plate to make it into an even surface for further re-engraving Although men-tioned by a few scholars, these hammer marks have never been taken seriously, or properly understood in their functions

Th e hundreds of hammered marks left embedded on the versos of the Job plates as traces of the repoussage technique are one of the most signifi cant dis-

coveries outlined in this book Th e examination of Blake’s copper plates plays a central role in this study to draw attention to this important but much-ignored material evidence With the aid of simple measuring tools, one can observe that the hammer marks on the verso of the copper plate correspond exactly to the engraved lines and fi gures on the recto of the plate Th ey also match the changes made by Blake noticed by Robert Essick on early print proofs to the fi nal state

Th ese prove that the hammer marks are neither random nor made by anyone other than Blake himself Th ey are indeed the traces of the technique of repous- sage, the materially indelible process of repeatedly correcting and modifying

original conceptions

As with most scholars of engraved prints, Essick’s method is to compare ferent proof states and to trace their development, systematically, from the fi rst working proof to the fi nal state.42 In this way, he has observed many important

dif-changes in Blake’s Job and other engravings Th is methodology, which is used

by most scholars of prints, directs us to the prints rather than the copper plates from which the prints were produced However, the examination of copper plate

and repoussage has revealed another important source for our understanding of

Blake’s techniques as a craft sman

In addition, this book will show that repoussage is not only found on the versos of the Job copper plates, but also on most of Blake’s other extant copper plates Chapter 3 will discuss the discovery of repoussage on the copper plate of Chaucers Canterbury Pilgrims, Th e Beggar’s Opera aft er Hogarth, the plates for the Illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, and even the early Gough plates

Th ese discoveries tell us that Blake made mistakes in engraving throughout his career, right from the period of his apprenticeship work on the Gough plates to the end of his life when he worked on the Dante plates Th ese not only include commercial plates, such as the Gough plates and the Hogarth plate, but also the

plates made to his own designs, such as Chaucers Canterbury Pilgrims, Job and

identify its actual use on Blake’s extant copper plates A photograph of repoussage

on a copper plate is shown by Morris Eaves45 to illustrate its function of ing lines and fi gures from the verso of the plate Th e particular example is of a plate engraved by Blake’s acquaintance William Sharp aft er John Opie’s design,

mend-Edward Long, published in 1796 Around 1813, the Sharp plate was altered by

Robert Graves (1798–1873) in order to delete the fi gure’s hat and the shadows

on the sitter’s head and face and to change the inscriptions below the portrait, this job possibly being a commission from Edward Long’s family However,

although Eaves discusses Sharp’s plate in the context of the engraving trade in the

late eighteenth century in his monograph Th e Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (1992), he made no examination of hammer marks

or copper plates on Blake’s own work It is clear that changing the images on

cop-per plates requires the technique of repoussage In Eaves’s example, the technique

is not for correction but for revision Blake’s designs of Job engraving, however,

have no intention of revising the central images because they strongly resemble

his early watercolours for Job made for Butts and Linnell Th e repoussage on the versos of Job copper plates, therefore, bespeaks correction for detailed mistakes,

as well as a hesitation in the skill and fl uidity of his technique

It reminds us of a very early commentary on Blake’s Job engravings only two

months aft er their publication, and the fi rst and only printed reference in Blake’s

lifetime, in a weekly journal Th e Star Chamber, 4 (Wednesday 3 May 1826),

pos-sibly by the later prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81).46 Remarkably,

Disraeli not only wrongly – but revealingly – identifi es the Job engravings as

‘etching’, he also comments on their perceived lack of ‘skilful execution’

Mr William Blake, whose illustrations in outline of Young, Gray, and other poets have been long before the public, has completed his designs for the Book of Job Some of the etchings are full of that remarkable wildness and singularity of concep- tion, for which Blake is so well known Th e embodying of the plagues infl icted on Job

by the Almighty, the personifi cation of a Night-mare, and the fi gures of the creation, are wonderful, although we do not think them equal either in point of originality or skilful execution to some of the earlier productions of this extraordinary artist 47

Th is verdict corroborates Blake’s earlier perception in Th e Public Address (1810)

that:

To what is it that Gentlemen of the fi rst Rank both in Genius & Fortune have scribed their Names [–] To My Inventions the Executive part they never disputed the Lavish praise I have received from all Quarters for Invention & Drawings has Gener-

sub-ally been accompanied by this he can conceive but he cannot Execute (E 582)

Modern scholars, in defence of Blake’s art, tend to dismiss this kind of criticism However, to place Blake in the context of his time and print culture, we need to reconsider Blake’s artistic skills carefully

In many ways, repoussage subverts the theory of unity of invention and

execution which has been most infl uentially debated by Essick and Viscomi

Th e hundreds of hammer marks on most of Blake’s extant copper plates display many mistakes and reworkings by Blake Th e techniques of engraving are far from being the spontaneous and immediate processes that Essick and Viscomi associate with Blake’s relief etching, neither are they from ‘immediate Dicta-

tion’, ‘without Premeditation’ as Blake claims about his writing (E 729) In other

words, descriptions appropriate to explain relief etching cannot also be taken

to encompass the very diff erent technique of engraving, as if the spontaneity of

etching was also a characteristic of engraving Rather, the Job plates are a long

term labour involving careful processes of composition, modifi cation, resizing, reorganization, and trial and error On these plates, Blake certainly did not unify his invention and execution If Blake did succeed in the unity of invention and execution in his writing and relief etching, he did not achieve the same ideal in engraving, either for commercial plates or for his own designs

While tracing the background of the theory of the unifi cation of invention and execution, I found a long history of argument in Blake studies, which reveals

an unexpected source from the Surrealism movement of the 1930s and 40s

Th e ‘one-pull’ theory of Essick and Viscomi follows the experiments in 1947 by Ruthven Todd, who was inspired by Graham Robertson’s experiments of 1906 and W E Moss’s experiments around the same time Against Frederick Tatham’s account about Blake’s process of printing in Rossetti’s ‘Supplementary’ chapter

to Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake, Robertson held a ‘two-pull’ theory, ing that Blake printed his Large Colour Prints (c 1795–1805) in a multistage

think-procedure Todd held the opposite view, the ‘one-pull’ theory, echoing Tatham but (like Essick and Viscomi) mainly concerned with Blake’s relief etching of the illuminated books rather than the Large Colour Prints Th is ‘one-pull’ theory, in turn, infl uenced Essick and Viscomi, although the latter two are against Todd’s transfer theory What has not been considered thoroughly is that Todd in his experiments on Blake’s printing of relief etching cooperated with two important Surrealist artists, William Stanley Hayter and Joan Miró Blake scholars have never paid much attention to the close relationship between Todd and Surre-alist artists of the 1930s and 40s, and its infl uence and association with Blake studies Th e history and contexts of these competing early and mid-twentieth century theories about printmaking, which will be outlined in Chapter 1, adds

an extra dimension of complexity to the current debate Th is Chapter traces the inheritance of early to mid-twentieth-century ideas in order to understand the background of the argument about Blake’s methods, which are a central concern

in current Blake studies It is not my attempt, however, to join in the argument about Blake’s printing methods, but to highlight the missing element in the Blake controversy: the neglect of Blake’s engraved copper plates, and to fi nd out the reasons for such neglect

Th e overlooked examination of copper plates does not only happen to Blake, but also in other general studies of prints Studies of prints tend to examine proofs on paper rather than the media they are printed from In Chapter 2, to establish the historical context of printing plates and to compare with Blake’s plates, I start my examination on Blake’s contemporary copper plates by other

engravers in major collections, which have obviously also been ignored for a long time Th ese collections include the Bodleian Library Oxford, British Museum, Houghton Library (Harvard), Huntington Library (CA USA), Lewis Walpole Library (Yale), Museum of Fine Arts Boston, National Gallery of Art Washing-ton DC, Pierpont Morgan Library (New York), Tate Britain, and the Victoria

& Albert Museum

Th e aim of this book, therefore, is a reinforcement of material and cal studies In the Blake conference during the Tate Exhibition of 2000, ‘Blake, Nation and Empire’, organized by David Worrall and Steve Clark on 8 and 9 December 2000, there were concerns expressed from the fl oor as to whether Blake studies had become too historical and should aim to go back to Frye’s

histori-interpretative methodology In a recent study, Sheila Spector in ‘Glorious prehensible’: Th e development of Blake’s Kabbalistic Language (2001) says ‘having

Incom-re-introduced consciousness into the study of Blake, scholars have begun to explore nonmaterial aspects of the emotive and rhetorical approaches to Blake’ (p 27) In the ‘Blake at 250’ Conference at York in 2007, there was also a heated debate from the fl oor between historical and hermeneutic approaches to Blake studies Th e emphasis on nonmaterial aspects seems to reject material studies and suggest that there is an emerging view that the material studies of Blake have been over-stressed Th is book will demonstrate the continued potency of material studies, whose importance as a foundation for interpretation of Blake’s works has for years been established by scholars, such as Geoff rey Keynes, David Erdman, G E Bentley, Jr., Robert Essick, Jon Mee and David Worrall Close examination of fi rsthand material is essential before any interpretation can be made At the very least, my book may serve as a record of an eyewitness, a poten-tially valuable contribution in a world where material artefacts, despite their physicality, do not escape destruction

Th e relative impermanence of Blakean artefacts has been highlighted in

Robert Rix’s PhD thesis, Bibles of Hell: William Blake and the Discourses of Radicalism,48 which discusses the apparent deterioration of a pencil sketch

drawn by Blake on his copy of Francis Bacon’s Essays Moral, Economical, and Political (1798) Blake’s annotated copy of Bacon in the Cambridge University

Library shows a drawing on p 55, described by Keynes and by Erdman,49 ‘Th e

devils arse [with chain of excrement ending in] A King’ (E 624) However, Rix

recently found that the original sketch has been erased at the top, where the words ‘Th e devils arse’ and the buttocks were originally evident.50 It is recovered

by Keynes’s imitation in pen of Blake’s annotations on another copy of the same book.51 Th e erasure of the image is not mentioned by Keynes or Erdman, but only later noticed by Bentley.52 Although this erasure has been a mystery, and no explanation is off ered, Rix’s observation tells us of the importance of an eyewit-

ness account, at the fi rsthand, artefacts rather than dependence on secondhand records

With the same purpose, the exposition of copper plates in this book also serves as a record, or eyewitness, of important original materials by Blake’s hand which have not hitherto been collated Should there be any deterioration of the material in the future, this record may at least preserve information for future studies

In art history, a recent scholarly tendency has similarly emphasized material studies and conservation Th e exhibition of Blake’s contemporary, watercolour-ist Th omas Girtin (1775–1802), at the Tate Britain from 4 July to 29 September

2002, showed concern for his working methods in the studio as well as from

nature In the exhibition and its catalogue, Th omas Girtin: Th e Art of our,53 the study of materials and techniques, along with the display of unfi nished works in progress, reveal artists’ working practice, the foundation of their ideas and achievement being equally important to the study of their lives and histori-cal contexts In addition, the unavoidable degradation of artworks shows the importance and urgency of conservation and how this exhibition and its mate-rial studies serve as an eyewitness at the present time In this respect, the very physical permanence of Blake’s copper plates makes it even more extraordinary that they have been neglected

Watercol-As the study of Blake reaches this scientifi c level, conservation of Blake’s works becomes essential Th e need for the conservation of Blake’s work exists not only because of the quick deterioration of paper and the pigments on his temperas and colour prints, but it also gives an opportunity for the scientifi c analysis of the materials, which helps us to understand how they achieve their eff ect as works Th e analysis of Blake’s media, for example, the binder and pig-ments Blake used for colour printing, becomes important for understanding of Blake’s techniques, the eff ect he achieved and the reasons why his choice was

so diff erent from his contemporaries For example, Michael Phillips cites the chemical studies of Robert Essick, Anne Maheux, Joyce Townsend and Sarah L Vallance on Blake’s media to explain how he made the mottled eff ect on colour prints.54 Essick and Viscomi also pay much attention to Blake’s printing media.55

Th ese studies further indicate the signifi cance of materials and the continuing demand for investigation However, the paradox continues: despite the very fra-gility of paint and paper, Blake’s prints have received extensive consideration and examination Th e extant copper plates, the most materially stable artefacts to have survived from Blake’s lifetime, have been neglected

Joyce Townsend and Piers Townshend, Tate conservation scientists, have

undertaken the restoration on Blake’s Large Colour Prints described in liam Blake the Painter at Work (2003) Discussions with them have benefi ted

Wil-my study very much concerning Blake’s techniques Although a very diff erent

medium from engraving, the working method of the Large Colour Prints also shows some inconsistency, and breaks the ideal of unifi cation of invention and

execution, similar to the Job engravings Th e printing of these works does not seem to be done totally in one-pull, nor with any evidence of two-pull with reg-istration, but rather a middle-way method Accordingly, more study of Blake’s materials is urgently needed Most likely Blake did not insist using only one method but chose whatever was convenient to him

To summarize the plan of this book, starting with the current debate about Blake’s printing techniques in this introductory chapter, I will discuss a number

of materialist problems in Blake studies, focusing on previous lacunae and on

my examination of Blake’s engraved copper plates Chapter 1 traces the early history of twentieth-century Blake studies, and discusses their association with Surrealism and automatic writing Chapter 2 examines copper plates engraved

by Blake’s contemporaries, especially with regard to the technique of sage Chapter 3 examines Blake’s extant printing copper plates, especially the twenty-two Job copper plates with details of their size and marks, along with

repous-a comprepous-arison with their proof strepous-ates to verify the chrepous-anges repous-and mistrepous-akes Blrepous-ake made Chapter 4 looks into the copper plate makers associated with Blake, who

left their marks on the plates Chapter 5 discusses Blake’s Virgil woodblocks, an early Virgil re-engraver c 1821–43 and the contradictory views of contemporar-

ies towards his works

– 19 –

1 THE HISTORY OF THE THEORY OF

CONCEPTION AND EXECUTION

Amongst studies of Blake’s etching and engraving techniques on copper, there

is no doubt that the most important in recent times are those put forward by Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi Both of them have dominated discussion

of Blake’s printmaking techniques, especially the technique of relief etching

Essick’s William Blake, Printmaker (1980) brings out the artisan’s life of Blake,

his profession, his medium and technique Th roughout William Blake, maker, we can see for the fi rst time how Blake worked on copper plates.1 Essick successfully gives us a clear view of the life Blake lived as a professional engraver and printmaker under the general public taste of the eighteenth century, and his struggle to move from being an ordinary reproductive printmaker to being

Print-an original artist Following Essick’s practical Print-and detailed research, Viscomi’s

infl uential Blake and the Idea of the Book has similarly become one of the most

indispensable books for Blake studies Working apparently increasingly

interde-pendently, at least aft er William Blake, Printmaker, Essick and Viscomi have had

intellectual collaboration and shared similar ideas Th eir argument for the unity

of invention (or conception) and execution has also become widely known,2 and cannot be ignored by anyone studying Blake’s copper plates and techniques

Th e theory of the unity of invention and execution is subtly presented in Essick but pushed to the extreme by Viscomi Th is is most clearly expressed in

Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993):

With the exception of Experience, Blake left virtually no manuscripts of illuminated

poems, let alone fair copies of them … Like tracings in the production of an ing draft s of poems appearing on illuminated plates may have been discarded aft er serving their purpose, replaced by the ‘printed manuscripts’ Th e poems – or at least the minor and major prophecies, texts whose forms were not externally structured

engrav-by rhyme schemes and ballad forms – may have been composed just as the tions were, spontaneously and almost automatically As persuasively demonstrated

illustra-by Essick in Blake and the Language of Adam, Blake’s mode of literary production

responsible for the prophecies was much as Blake himself described it – tated Essick shows why Blake’s metaphor of ‘dictation’ was not mere topos, and how oral formulas and Blake’s aesthetic of uniting invention and execution made it tech-

unpremedi-nically possible for Blake to write, as Blake told Butts, ‘twelve or sometimes twenty

or thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against [his] Will’ (E 729)

Because illuminated printing and oral-formulaic poetry are both autographic, they technically could have occurred concurrently 3

It is clear throughout his book that Visomi’s assumption is that illuminated printing represents undivided labour, unifi ed invention and execution, and unconventional production.4 Yet the assumption is extended to the whole of Blake’s printmaking so that his readers hardly notice that it only covers the relief etched illuminated books and not his engravings, which were Blake’s main career output

Similarly, Essick says in his William Blake, Printmaker that Blake’s graphic

techniques (for relief etching in particular) are themselves claimed to possess intrinsic meaning as ‘activities of mind’.5 In Essick’s words, ‘when Blake exag-gerates these commercial techniques and raises them so far above the threshold

of vision that they replace representational forms and become that which is represented’.6 In short, ‘graphic method becomes part of verbal message’.7 With

‘method’ becoming ‘message’, Essick’s eff ort of building ‘conception’ into Blake’s

‘execution’ is clearly seen His discussion of technique (the execution) is working towards the theory that Blake as an artist chose the technique with his mind, not as an artisan controlled by the mechanical We should note, however, the word ‘execution’ here is restricted to relief etching, a technique which Essick and Viscomi noticeably privilege

Essick’s tendency to emphasize relief etching leads to the implication that Blake used it as his most successful way of combining invention and execu-tion Aft er his return from Felpham to London in 1803, Essick claims Blake

‘return[ed] to his earlier graphic innovations as a means for communicating his renewed vision’.8 By this, Essick means the relief etching of both text and design

In the letter to Th omas Butts of 10 January 1803, Blake wrote he had resumed

his ‘primitive & original ways of Execution in both painting & engraving’ (E 724) Essick is certain that ‘by this Blake must have meant relief etching’.9 Essick’s theory of Blake’s ‘unity of invention and execution’ is more fully presented in

William Blake and the Language of Adam Although William Blake and the Language of Adam is not particularly concerned with Blake’s craft techniques,

it is clear that the preconditions for his interpretation of Blake were established

and laid out in the primary work done for William Blake, Printmaker In chapter

4, ‘Language and Modes of Production’, Essick argues that, for Blake, there is

‘no distinction between the source of conception and the medium of its

exe-cution: the medium is the origin’.10 Th is is taking the cue from Blake’s words

that ‘Invention depends Altogether upon Execution or Organization’ (E 637)

in his annotations to Reynolds’s Discourses, and his antipathy to ‘the pretended

Philosophy which teaches that Execution is the power of One & Invention of

Another’ (E 699) Although William Blake and the Language of Adam does not

refer much to Blake’s copper plates or practical techniques, it is based on the practical ground of his earlier research, and its infl uence has been continuing for more than a decade In Essick’s theory, the ‘spontaneous’ and the ‘immedi-ate’ played a major role in Blake’s inspiration of poetry as well as his pictorial production.11

However, the theory about Blake’s execution and conception was not Essick and Viscomi’s invention It has a long history back in the early Blake studies and

an artistic and literary background in the early twentieth century Th is chapter will show how the Essick/Viscomi thesis of the unity of invention and execution

in Blake’s relief etching is actually a later incarnation of early tury idealizations of automatic writing developed by 1930s and 40s Surrealists including, most notably, the Blake scholar Ruthven Todd who not only car-ried out reconstructive experiments (as Essick and Viscomi acknowledge) but who had close links with major Surrealist printmakers who were enthusiastic about the possibilities of automatic writing Th e certainty with which Viscomi both assents to, and validates, Essick’s preliminary work is notable As quoted

twentieth-cen-before, Viscomi wrote in Blake and the Idea of the Book that ‘Essick shows in William Blake and the Language of Adam why Blake’s metaphor of “dictation”

was not mere topos … Blake’s aesthetic of uniting invention and execution made

it possible to write, as Blake told Butts … “without Premeditation” … Because illuminated poetry and oral-formulaic poetry are both autographic, they tech-nically could have occurred concurrently’.12 Ruthven Todd’s Surrealist friends would have heartily agreed While Joan Miró, William Hayter and, of course, Ruthven Todd actually experimented directly in reconstructing Blake’s methods

of relief etching, Blake was already a much-celebrated fi gure amongst Surrealists fascinated by what they called, ultimately derived from their understanding of Sigmund Freud, ‘automatic writing’ Th e Essick/Viscomi thesis is not without its own, unacknowledged, genealogy in Surrealist practices

Ruthven Todd (1914–78), has been widely recognized as an important early twentieth-century scholar by Blake critics and collectors such as Keynes, Robertson, Bentley and others Among scholarly circles around the time of the Second World War and during the post-war period, Todd was well known for his

enthusiasm about Blake’s materials Todd’s re-editing of Gilchrist’s Life of liam Blake (1942) started his research work on Blake His contributions to Blake

Wil-studies are mainly material Wil-studies with exhaustive tracing of historical details

Th ese can be found not only in his notes for the Life of William Blake, including published and unpublished manuscripts at Leeds University, his books Tracks

in the Snow: Studies in English Science and Art (1946) and William Blake: the Artist (1971) but also in his extensive correspondence with many contempo-

rary Blake scholars Among them, Lt.-Col W E Moss was especially important

as a major collector of Blake’s works as well as on account of his own studies

of Blake Th e correspondence between Moss and Todd reveals the exchange

of ideas and sharing of interests One crucial item originally in Moss’s

collec-tion is the unique fragment of the etched copper plate America plate a (NGA),

which came to Todd’s attention and inspired his experiments in 1947 Todd was obviously animated by Moss’s experiments in printing from this etched plate, as well as Graham Robertson’s experiments with colour printing from millboard

Th is chapter will show the history and relationship of these early Blake ars and how Todd played a central role as an infl uential fi gure Th e chapter will also throw new light on the neglected fi gure of Moss whose crucial role in Blake studies still needs fuller research

schol-It is rarely mentioned in Blake studies that the other, very diff erent, part of Todd’s life distinct from the academic world of Blake scholarship was his involve-ment in the Surrealist movement Todd’s involvement with the Surrealists has never been recognized as having any signifi cance in relation to his Blake stud-ies, but these two worlds of Todd coincided in the 1940s Long preceding the post-war impetus to academic study given by the publication of Northrop Frye’s

Fearful Symmetry (1947) and David V Erdman’s Blake: Prophet against Empire

(1954), Blake was a popular name during the important 1936 International realist Exhibition in London, which was also a signifi cant encounter between Todd and the Surrealists Th ere are many surprising similarities between Blake’s theory of conception and execution and the Surrealist manifestos As the Surre-alists found their echoes in Blake and other preceding artists’ works, Surrealism

Sur-in turn Sur-infl uenced Blake scholars through Todd’s relationship with the artists from the group

Stanley William Hayter (1901–88), a prominent British printmaker of the twentieth century, was associated with the Surrealist group much earlier than Todd His printmaking workshop, Atelier 17, was a major infl uence on many eminent modern artists, including Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró With his new methods of engraving, Hayter spread Surrealist ideas of automatism and of the subconscious during the 1930s and 40s It was in the workshop of Atelier 17, re-established in New York aft er moving from Paris, that Todd cooperated with Hayter and Miró in an experimental reconstruction of Blake’s processes of relief etching and printing.13 Th e similarity between Surrealist automatism and Blake’s idea of the unity of invention and execution strongly suggests a connection between Surrealism, Todd’s experiments and the one-pull theory of Essick and Viscomi Hayter was known as a strongly philosophical artist, one who held con-sidered theories about his artistic practices.14 Although experiments attempting

to reconstruct Blake’s methods carried out by Todd, Hayter and Miró derive from Hayter’s professional experience of printmaking, there was also an ideol-ogy behind the idea of automatism in Surrealism which led their practice

Despite their expertise in printmaking and Blake studies, the experiments of Todd, Hayter and Miró were largely discounted by Essick and Viscomi Th e lat-ter two reconstructed Todd’s experiments but claimed that Todd was wrong in saying Blake used transfer techniques because Todd doubted Blake’s ability to do mirror writing.15 Essick and Viscomi established their authority with powerful argument and historical and practical evidence Nevertheless, Essick and Visco-mi’s notion of Blake’s unity of invention and execution, and his one-pull printing process, appear to have been inherited from Todd and his Surrealist background without acknowledgement



Th e origin of one-pull and two-pull theories derives from Frederick Tatham and

W Graham Robertson.16 Both theories have little solid ground of proof ertson’s assertion of multiple printing was based on his own artistic observations; while Tatham’s description of Blake using one-pull method on his colour prints was from his fallible memory of distant conversations, bearing in mind that he was only three years old when Blake made his Large Colour Prints in 1795

Rob-Th e analysis of technique presented by Essick and Viscomi has its own tory, which has been overlooked Although Essick and Viscomi make reference

his-to the experiments of etching and printing carried out by Ruthven Todd in the 1940s, they share with Todd a curious belief in the powers of automatic writing

Th e process of automatic writing was of enormous interest both to Todd and to the Surrealists of the 1920s and 30s Th is appears to have prompted Todd’s inter-est in Blake as a possible automatic writer Execution without premeditation, as Essick and Viscomi have described Blake’s relief-etching process, together with the legacy of Surrealist automatic writing has continued as a common feature in Blake studies from Todd’s time onwards In other words, although Essick and Viscomi rejected Todd’s theories of Blake’s techniques, his legacy and the infl u-ence of the Surrealist group has been underestimated in the wider circle of Blake studies

Ruthven Todd was the editor of Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake, published

in 1942 for the Everyman’s Library, a new edition following Graham

Robert-son’s earlier edition (London: John Lane, 1907) His Tracks in the Snow: Studies

in English Science and Art (1946) and William Blake: the Artist (1971) were, in

their time, two signifi cant historical research works on Blake and his poraries Th e Everyman’s Library edition of Alexander Gilchrist: Life of William Blake (1942) is the formal start of Todd’s work on Blake.17 Todd corrected quota-tions from Blake which were changed for the reason that ‘another word seemed

contem-‘“better”’.18 Anne Gilchrist, Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti fi ished Gilchrist’s work aft er his death and, for their own reasons, sometimes changed Blake’s words from those in Gilchrist’s manuscript Todd was part of

n-a scholn-arly trend in fn-avour of n-authenticn-ating Bln-ake’s writing ‘Th e great industry

of rewriting Blake’ at the end of the nineteenth century, Todd says, was nating in the work of the late E J Ellis, who not only prepared a new text, but invented a new author for it, whom he called “the real Blake”’.19 Todd’s edition was intended to restore the original text of Blake, which is a historical attempt followed up by other Blake scholars

‘culmi-Todd’s Alexander Gilchrist: Life of William Blake of 1942 was revised in

a second edition published in 1945 with expanded notes For the next forty

years, Todd continued collecting materials for a third edition of his Gilchrist

Th ese appear in three volumes now in the Special Material Department of the Brotherton Library, Leeds University (MS 470.292–4) Th e copyright page is amended ‘COMPLETELY REVISED, 1968’ indicating that Todd worked on

it almost until the end of his life Th ere are leaves from Todd’s 1942 edition of

Gilchrist, separated and pasted on large-sized paper, and bound in three albums,

with Todd’s new addition of meticulous notes neatly handwritten in the margin

Th ey have never been published, although Todd tried hard to arrange tion with the Clarendon Press.20 Th is is perhaps the most important work Todd did on Blake G E Bentley’s article, ‘Ruthven Todd’s Blake Papers at Leeds’ (1982), comments that ‘Th e work he [Todd] did was detailed and valuable, and much of it is new and fascinating … Th ese fascinating materials for a new edition

publica-of Gilchrist are very extensive and very incomplete Th ey deserve to be brought into order and up to date and published’.21 Bentley at that time had agreed to serve as ‘midwife’ to the project if a publisher could be found However, this never happened, and all the manuscripts of Todd on Blake studies, including his correspondence with many Blake scholars, were given to Leeds University Library by his son, Christopher Todd, a professor in the French Department of Leeds University

Th e importance of Todd’s role in early Blake studies may be discerned in his contribution not only to re-editing Gilchrist’s references to Blake’s writing, but also to cataloguing Blake’s art Not only did he correct Blake’s texts in Gilchrist’s edition used by Keynes and others,22 his catalogue of Blake’s paintings and draw-

ings later became the foundation for Martin Butlin’s Th e Paintings and Drawings

of William Blake (1981), which is the defi nitive catalogue raisonné of Blake

stud-ies Todd says:

Th e digging and nosing around which I was doing (Geoff rey called me ‘the Mole’) did more than correct Gilchrist Out of my reading and routing came the material

which I was later to use in parts of my Tracks in the Snow and also an enormous

vol-ume, which I typed on blue folio legal paper which came folded in quires Th is is the foundation of what will one day be the defi nitive catalogue of all Blake’s drawings and paintings On this last, I fell down in 1947, but Geoff rey kept his copy up to date and the job is now in the capable hands of Martin Butlin of the Tate Gallery I had, in

America, a revised and retyped copy of the catalogue and, since I did not know what

to do with it, I gave it to the Library of Congress as everyone there had always been kind to me As this contains much that is not in Geoff rey’s earlier version, I have now arranged for it to be lent to Martin Butlin Th ese two vast tomes contain, apart from anything else, the results of reading my way through every auction catalogue I could

fi nd from about 1790 on 23

In other words, as Butlin acknowledges, Todd made a major formative bution towards the accumulation of the materials later assembled in Butlin’s

contri-catalogue raisonné.24 Although Butlin scrupulously acknowledged his debt to Todd, it is probably the case that relatively few modern scholars will be aware that Ruthven Todd – as much as Sir Geoff rey Keynes – played a formative role in

the foundation of Butlin’s catalogue Eventually, much modern historical research

of Blake’s text and image can be traced back to Todd As his friend Julian Symons described it, Todd ‘was not especially interested in Blake as philosopher or mys-tic, but in his artistic achievement and his quality as a technical innovator’.25

Th e introductory note and the endnotes of Todd’s edition of Gilchrist’s Th e Life of William Blake show that he had close relations with many Blake schol-

ars and was in frequent contact with them Th ese included Geoff rey Keynes, Joseph Wicksteed, Graham Robertson, and W E Moss Th e work of Anthony Blunt, a major British Blake scholar, was also an important reference for Todd.26

It appears that the experiments Todd did in 1947 with the Surrealist artists liam Hayter and Joan Miró in reconstructing Blake’s printmaking technique had their early inspiration at the time Todd re-edited Gilchrist’s biography of Blake

Wil-in the early 1940s He knew that Graham Robertson did experiments ing Blake’s colour printing with his friend Newton Wethered around 1905, and

imitat-perhaps Todd even saw Robertson’s ‘fake’ Blake, King of the Jews, which came

near to being sold as an original at Sotheby’s until Robertson’s intervention.27

Th e colour print used Blake’s design in watercolour in an attempt at imitating Blake’s printing technique.28 In a letter of 26 November 1941, Graham Robert-son wrote to Kerrison Preston:

I’m so glad that Todd’s letter interested you and that you like his Toddity So do I Yes, he’s a whale for work, isn’t he? About the ‘King of the Jews’, Todd is here referring

to my fake ‘colour print’ off ered for sale at Sotheby’s among the possessions of one Shaw and withdrawn at my request I have the original watercolour and produced the

‘colour print’, not as a hoax but as an experimental attempt to imitate Blake’s queer process Shaw bought it from Robert Ross, but as a W.G.R., not as a W.B It looked

so well, centred on the Sotheby wall, that I was quite sorry to expose it as a fraud I wonder what became of it It will probably fi gure as a Blake again some day, but it could easily be unmasked by the watermark on the paper 29

Graham Robertson was also an earlier editor of Gilchrist’s Blake biography, and bequeathed many works to Tate Britain which now form the core of their

Blake collection Ten of the twelve Blake Large Colour Prints, excluding Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah and Satan Exulting Over Eve, were given to the Tate Gallery in 1939 and in 1948 Christ Appearing to his Apostles was also given by

Robertson Graham Robertson was an artist, playwright, signifi cant Blake lector, and had a large amount of correspondence with Todd and other Blake scholars and collectors, such as Keynes and Kerrison Preston.30 His friend New-

col-ton Wethered also wrote art historical books, including From Giotto to John:

Th e Development of Painting (1926) containing a chapter on ‘William Blake and

Imagination’ In other words, this whole period of early twentieth-century est in Blake, culminating in Robertson’s bequest of the immensely infl uential Blake holding now in Tate Britain, was intimately connected with attempts to reconstruct Blake’s technical processes Although now overlooked, Todd’s role and his personal interest in Surrealism were central to the whole episode Todd’s notes also refl ect his specifi c interest in such things as the copper plates, part of his emphasis on the materials and techniques of Blake For exam-ple, to argue that Gilchrist is wrong in saying Blake could not fi nd publishers for

inter-his Songs, Todd says, ‘A glance at the various publications of the late eighteenth

century should convince the reader that Blake could have found an ordinary publisher if he had wished, and that Gilchrist’s theorizing is at fault; the cost of the copper plates, alone, must have been considerably greater than that of type-setting would have been’.31 In other words, Todd was always willing to consider the practical dimensions of William Blake’s work Notably, much of his informa-tion about copper plates came from W E Moss

Lieutenant-Colonel William Edward Moss, another important but neglected contributor to Todd’s book, carried out his own experiments on Blake’s method

of copper plate etching around the same time as Robertson’s experiments on large colour printing from millboard in the early 1900s Todd particularly acknowl-edges Moss ‘for a most generous supply of unpublished information’, cited in

the footnotes of his new edition of Gilchrist: Life of William Blake.32 In other words, Moss, Robertson and Todd were all intimately concerned with Blake’s techniques and corresponded with each other about their mutual interests Moss manuscripts, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, have long been neglected Th ese include Moss’s accounts of Blake’s engraving and printing tech-niques and his correspondence with other Blake scholars in the early twentieth century.33 Th ere is a need for further investigation once we realize the crucial role

of Moss in Blake studies

Essick notices the signifi cant role of Moss in print collecting aspects in Blake studies:

Blake’s reputation as a printmaker grew slowly, if unspectacularly, through the teenth century By its last years, several enthusiasts, notably W E Moss and W A White, began to build signifi cant collections of Blake’s prints Th ey were followed

nine-in the 1920s by Lessnine-ing J Rosenwald, whose great collection of illumnine-inated books and separate plates is now divided between the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art, Washington; and by Sir Geoff rey Keynes, whose remarkable eff orts

as a collector and scholar have contributed so much to Blake’s modern reputation as poet, painter, and printmaker 34

Moss was once the owner of a crucially important collection of Blake’s works, which he sold in Sotheby’s auction on 2 March, 1937 Th e sales catalogue lists

129 original works and important early facsimiles of Blake (lots 138–263)

Moss’s original Blake collections include Th e Gates of Paradise For Children

[A], ‘Th e Accusers’ Copy E, America (1793) Copy K, A Descriptive Catalogue (1809) Copy M, For Children: Th e Gates of Paradise (1793) Copy A, ‘Joseph of Arimathea’ (1773, c 1785, c 1809) Copy D, Letters: 1800 April 17 and 1803 January 30, Mirth (c 1820) Copy B, Poetical Sketches (1783) Copy O, Songs of Innocence Copies B, C, Yb and Yd, engraving for William Enfi eld’s Th e Speaker [1774, i.e 1780], engraving for Young’s Night Th oughts Census of Coloured Copies Copy B (see various references in Bentley, Blake Books, 1977, and Sothe-

by’s sales catalogue, 2 March 1937) Most importantly, in his collection was a

fragment of the only surviving etched copper plate, America plate a (a cancelled

plate), which he quite likely bought directly from the Butts family.35 It is now in the Lessing J Rosenwald Collection of the Library of Congress Todd notes:

P 105, l 22 All the copper plates for Blake’s illuminated books have now disappeared

with the exception of a fragment from a cancelled plate of America, with an

engrav-ing by Th omas Butts, Jun., on the back, done under Blake’s tuition; this belonged

to Lt-Col W E Moss, and is now in the collection of Mr Lessing J Rosenwald, Philadelphia Th e reference here is to the plates Frederick Tatham lent Gilchrist, from

which electrotypes were made and impressions taken for the two editions of the Life,

1863, 1880 A set of these electrotypes, showing the depth of Blake’s bitings, recently came into the possession of Mr Keynes and myself, and has been deposited with the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 36

With this small piece of copper plate as a reference, Moss made experiments of etching on copper imitating Blake’s process

Th e information Moss gave to Todd shows his deep interest and committed scholarship to Blake studies Todd frequently mentions Moss’s suggestions about Blake’s works, such as the identity of a printer,37 a possible misprint,38 the rela-

tionship between Salzmann’s Elements of Morality and Songs of Innocence, Th e Gates of Paradise, and Th e Grave,39 a possible misreading of the imprint on For Children: Th e Gates of Paradise,40 the census of the coloured copies of Young’s

Night Th oughts,41 the cost of copyright,42 the price of the pictures displayed in

the Exhibition of Count Truchsess in Th e Farington Diary,43 and his

unpub-lished book, the Bibliography of the Classical Outlines of John Flaxman, R A 44Moss and Todd collaborated extensively on the bibliographical and material

nature of Blake’s works Moss’s role as the owner of what is still the only known extant example of a copper plate from the illuminated books should lead us to attend to his opinions

Moss told Todd about the location of some of Blake’s original copper plates, and had himself estimated the contemporary cost of the copper plates Moss and Todd appear to have frequently discussed the whereabouts of Blake’s copper plates A note for Gilchrist’s Chapter III mentions the portrait of Edward III, and relates that ‘Lt.-Col W E Moss tells me that the original copper plates are

in the Bodleian Library, having been bequeathed by Richard Gough’.45 In other words, Moss was an important source, mediated by Todd, for our tracing the history of Blake’s plates For Chapter XII, Todd notes:

P 96, l 2 While in 1805 Blake engraved three plates for Flaxman’s Iliad, receiving

£5 per plate, this story has usually been discredited However, recent researches by Lt.-Col W E Moss, embodied in an unpublished study, would seem to show that Gilchrist’s account of the matter has, to say the least of it, a strong foundation of probability … I gather that these coppers (presumably steel-faced) were in use until

1880 Messrs George Bell, whose predecessors published these belated editions, tell

me, however, that the plates have since been destroyed 46

Th is information is valuable and has, in turn, been passed on by Essick in his

William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations (1991) who pieces together ther elements of the story that the copper plates of Flaxman’s Iliad engraved by

fur-Blake:

were acquired by William Sotheby in 1832, but there is no record of impressions

being taken from them until the 1870 Classical Compositions and Compositions fr om

the Iliad (the latter simply a separate issue of the former).47

Essick continues that:

According to Ruthven Todd, ‘Blake’s Dante Plates’, Times Literary Supplement (29

August 1968), 928, Bell and Daldy sold the plates as scrap metal in 1917 48

Moss and Todd are proper and exacting scholars in the contributions made by their research, and are still highly regarded by the best modern Blake scholars However, on the important issue of Moss’s experiments, Todd off ers very limited information, only directing the reader to Moss’s unpublished research:

For an account of Blake’s method of engraving, and contemporary experiments in

the same direction, I cannot do better than refer the reader to Mona Wilson, Th e Life of William Blake, 1927, pp 318–9, and Laurence Binyon, Th e Engraved Designs

of William Blake, 1926 A considerable amount of research into the contemporary

experiments has been done by Lt.-Col W E Moss, whose fi ndings, unfortunately, have not yet been published 49

Although Essick and Viscomi have emphasized the importance of Todd’s iments, it is clear that Todd himself owed much to the example set by Moss Todd’s account of Moss does not rule out that they both held extensive discus-sion or correspondence about their experiments As a scholar of integrity, Todd would not have wished to have published details of Moss’s work if Moss contem-plated publishing them himself at a later date

exper-Exploring only a small way into Moss’s context throws up some remarkable details about the sociability and interconnection of beliefs and networks amongst early twentieth-century collectors interested in Blake Looking into Moss’s back-ground, the large amount of books in special bindings in his collection sold in

1937 Sotheby’s auction50 and his works on bookbinding, such as Bindings fr om the Library of Robt Dudley, Earl of Leicester, K G., 1533–1588 (1934) and Th e English Grolier, A Catalogue of Books in Gold-Tooled Bindings From the Library

of Th omas Wotton,…at Canterbury, 1542–52 (1941–2), suggest that he was not

only a collector himself but also an expert bibliophile, amateur bookbinder and printer Moss was also a Freemason, a member of the Apollo University Lodgeat the University of Oxford,51 and had published a book Freemasonry in France in 1725–1735 (1938), with printed ‘by Bro W E Moss’ on its title page A hand-

written note in the British Library copy gives his address: ‘Lt Col W E Moss | Rivey Lodge | Old Woking Road | West Byfl eet’.52 Th is work is a paper Moss had presented at a Freemasonry Lodge meeting In the course of the Introduction, Moss mentions that:

‘Dring’ so oft en alluded to, is a Bibliography of English Masonic Literature before

1751, written for the Lodge Quatuor Coronati, London, by Edmund Hunt Dring, for some time head of the well-known fi rm of Quaritch, before 1912: off -prints dated

1913 are to be found 53

Interestingly, Bernard Quaritch (1819–99), the founder of the fi rm Moss

men-tions in Freemasonry in France, was one of the major dealers of Blake’s works in

the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Th e network of early twentieth-century bibliophiles, Freemasons and Blake collectors is surprisingly

extensive Quaritch bought Songs of Innocence Copy Yb from W E Moss at

Sotheby’s, 2 March 1937, lot 145, for £50 (now in Harvard).54 Th ere are both Blake books and Freemasonry books in Moss’s sales catalogue of 2 March 1937

A Freemason exhibition catalogue of 1885 implies on its title page that Quaritch was a Freemason:

Th e List of Manuscripts and Early-Printed Books, exhibited and described by Bro Bernard Quaritch, Librarian and ex-president of the Sette of Odd Volumes, at the Free- masons’ Tavern, on Friday, June 5, 1885, is presented to the guests on that occasion by his oddship the President James Roberts Brown, as a souvenir of an evening spent by them with Th e Sette of Odd Volumes