Exhibitions
William Blake Tate Britain 11th September 2019 to 2nd February 2020
In 1802, taking advantage of the shortlived Peace of Amiens which made cross-channel travel possible, Joseph, Count Truchsess, brought a collection of 700 Old Master paintings from Vienna to London in the hope of restoring his fortunes by selling them, perhaps as a basis for a British national gallery.
Among them were many great names, incidentally including ‘Vinci (Leonardo da), A salvator mundi, on wood, high 1ft 3in wide 11in’ – rather smaller than the much disputed version sold by Christie’s for $450m. Among the visitors to the exhibition was William Blake, who wrote to a patron, ‘Suddenly, on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery, I was again enlightened by the light I enjoyed in my youth…’
The country had to wait another quarter-century for its national gallery, but the count’s exhibition did inspire Blake to put on, in 1809, a show of 16 of his own works, above his brother’s Broad Street hosiery shop. It attracted few visitors and just one – scathing – review – but this lack of success was not entirely what it seems.
Several works had already been sold to patrons and supporters, and his ‘idiosyncratic’ style was close to that of other artists, notably James Barry and the Royal Academicians Henry Fuseli and Richard Westall. Selling exhibitions were popular and, had he wished to collaborate with others, Blake could have shown not only at the Academy but more pertinently at the newly-launched Society of Painters in Watercolour or its rival, Associated Artists. Turner was already staging his own exhibitions, but in a purpose-built gallery close to the fashionable world rather than a domestic space in Soho.
As the curators of this Tate show, Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon, write in the accompanying book, Blake ‘was a man of his time, even in those aspects of his imaginative life and creative practice that seem most wholly out of his time’. However, he wished to distance himself from his colleagues to create what he saw as a grander art, mythologising the country’s history, and he hoped to attract commissions for large frescoes painted in a mixture of watercolour and tempera. Thus it was bourgeois patronage that he wished to attract, rather than a wider public.
This show is billed as the ‘largest survey for a generation’; one hopes that it will not resemble its 2000 precursor, which offered more a physical catalogue raisonné than an enjoyable exhibition. There are over 300 works, opening with Albion Rose (c1793), an exuberant visualisation of the mythical founding of Britain, and ending with The Ancient of Days (1827), a frontispiece for an edition of Europe: A Prophecy completed only days before his death.
Highlights include Newton (1795c1805) and Ghost of a Flea (c1819-20), and there is a recreation of the 1809 show, together with projected full-scale images to show how the proposed frescoes might have turned out.