Blake’s own pastoral symphonies
William Blake in Sussex: Visions of Albion Petworth House
William Blake was born in Soho in 1757. Seventy years later, he died a mile down the road, off the Strand. A Londoner to the core, his flaming visions came to him amid the filth and bustle of the metropolis and its suburbs.
Except, that is, for the years between 1800 and 1803, when Blake and his wife, Catherine, quit the capital and lived in the coastal village of Felpham in Sussex. The story of Blake’s stay there, and the impact of the beautiful rolling landscape upon his work, is the subject of a new exhibition of more than 50 artworks at Petworth House, West Sussex.
Blake’s pretty cottage, with its thatched roof, survives today, albeit swallowed up by Bognor Regis. When he lived in Felpham, though, the village, just a quarter of a mile from the sea, had a population of 305 “genuine Saxons”, as Blake described them, “handsomer than the people about London”.
He was enchanted by his new surroundings, an earthly paradise that he sensed would stimulate exciting creativity. “Tho’ small,” he wrote to his patron, the civil servant Thomas Butts, describing his “beautiful” new situation, “it is well proportion’d and if I should ever build a palace, it would only be my cottage enlarged.”
Blake depicted his cottage several times, for instance in a rare watercolour landscape lent from the Tate, in which, with a typically cosmic flourish, a shaft of sunlight breaks through a lowering cloud and shines directly upon his new home.
He illustrated it again in a plate for his eccentric epic poem which he probably began in Felpham after an extraordinary vision: supposedly, Milton’s spirit entered Blake’s body in the form of a comet that fell upon his left foot. The preface to the poem contains the lines now known independently as Jerusalem, making the Sussex Downs the likely model for “England’s green and pleasant land”.
The exhibition evokes Blake’s experiences in Sussex lucidly and concisely, explaining that he moved there at the invitation of the poet William Hayley, who lived nearby. Hayley offered Blake regular work, providing him with needed income.
Over time, though, Blake came to resent Hayley, whom he eventually called “the enemy of my spiritual life”. Blake railed against the workaday nature of Hayley’s commissions, which included 18 decorative tempera portraits of poets for the latter’s new villa at Felpham. Two of them, depicting busts of Edmund Spenser and John Milton, are on show.
At the heart of the show, the third in a loose series of exhibitions focusing on Romantic artists associated with Petworth (following Turner and Constable), are three paintings by Blake in watercolour and tempera from its collection. Surprisingly, perhaps, the two best: Satan Calling up His Legions (c. 1800-05) and A Vision of the Last Judgement (1808), were not commissioned by Petworth’s owner, the 3rd Earl of Egremont, a champion of contemporary British art, but by his estranged countess, Elizabeth Ilive, the only woman to become the philandering earl’s wife. The latter composition, a vortex of figures ascending to heaven and tumbling into hell, is a swirling, complex tour de force, in part touching upon the theme of infidelity.
The painting offers a prime example of the rhapsodic hallucinatory intensity of Blake’s work, and is a reminder that his art articulates not the external appearance of the world, but force of feeling within.
Blake’s perception of another, supernatural dimension, a sort of helter-skelter spirit-world, was his great gift. Ultimately, his transcendent visions have universal force, and float free of time or place.
This can make the careful historical approach of the Petworth show, which features loans from the British Museum and National Portrait Gallery, as well as Tate, seem mildly absurd: after all, what does it matter whether the generic rural landscape in one of Blake’s charming tiny woodcut illustrations for The Pastorals of Virgil (a popular school text) was inspired by this or that view of Sussex?
At times, the exhibition risks overstating the links between this specific spot of countryside and Blake’s work. Overall, though, William Blake in Sussex makes a strong case for the importance of this sweet pastoral interlude in the visionary artist’s life.