A SHARED VISION
Tate Britain’s new exhibition dedicated to William Blake celebrates the role of his devoted wife Catherine in fulfilling his artistic ambitions
Tate Britain’s latest exhibition reveals how
William Blake’s wife Catherine inspired the mystic artist’s work
The spirit said to him, “Blake be an artist & nothing else”.’ So wrote the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson in one of the many faithful accounts he made of his conversations with William Blake. Evoking the lofty creative aspirations of the great 18th-century poet, painter and printmaker, as well as his supposed communion with a higher spiritual plane, this anecdote has come to epitomise our view of Blake as a lone visionary, spurred on solely by the power of his imagination.
Yet singular as Blake was in his devotion to ideals of artistic freedom, he also depended on the assistance of those around him to eke out a living. There was his father James Blake, who encouraged him to nurture his talent, not to mention giving him money and shelter; his patrons, for whose benevolence he was not always as grateful as he might have been; and his beloved – and longsuffering – wife Catherine Blake, who provided him with emotional, domestic and practical support. These characters all make an appearance in a new exhibition at Tate Britain that will pay tribute to the vitality and authenticity of Blake’s artworks, while offering an honest appraisal of the conditions that made their creation possible. ‘As much as it is a celebration of Blake’s mysticism and spirituality, it’s also about bringing him down to earth,’ explains the curator Martin Myrone.
Born in 1757 at a shop on Broad (now Broadwick) Street in Soho, where his father ran a hosiery and haberdashery business, Blake enjoyed a happy childhood without any formal schooling, instead attending drawing classes from the age of 10. There were early signs that Blake was no ordinary child: legend has it that, while roaming around Peckham Rye Common, he saw a vision of a ‘tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars’. Still, he was sufficiently level-headed to complete his apprenticeship with the engraver James Basire and, aged 21, to enrol in the Royal Academy, then based at Somerset House. Though the teaching at the school was, in those days, rather lax, the experience was formative in inspiring Blake’s ambition to become a great modern painter, as well as introducing him to the anatomical drawings of artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Michelangelo, who were to be important influences.
It was also around this time that Blake met and fell in love with a working-class girl called Catherine Boucher, whom he married in 1782 after a year-long courtship. Illiterate at the time, Catherine signed their wedding certificate with an ‘X’, but under Blake’s tutelage she learnt not only to read and write, but also to support her husband’s creative endeavours, operating the press for his illuminated books and hand-finishing them in watercolour.
‘She’s a kind of unsung hero behind his work,’ says Amy Concannon, the exhibition’s assistant curator, who believes that Catherine’s significance in Blake’s biography has been underplayed (it is only in the past decade that she has even received her own entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). To rectify this oversight, the Tate will exhibit a series of illustrations, produced to accompany John Bunyan’s religious allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, that Catherine is believed to have coloured. Deaccessioned by their previous owner, the Frick Collection in New York, because of her involvement, they are in fact a wonderfully imaginative set of images that chart the protagonist’s journey from Earth to heaven in vivid detail.
Blake himself spoke openly about the extent of Catherine’s contribution to his work, particularly the Divine Comedy series on which he worked in the last three years of his life. ‘My wife alone is answerable for their having existed in any finished state – I am too much attached to Dante to think much of anything else,’ he wrote in an 1827 letter to one of his young patrons, John Linnell. He cannot have been an easy man to live with – Catherine herself commented wryly that she had ‘very little of Mr Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise’ – but he remained a devoted husband throughout their 17 years of marriage, declaring in his final days that ‘you have ever been an angel to me’ (angels, of course, being a recurring motif in his paintings and poetry). The writer William Hayley, who commissioned Blake to engrave the illustrations for one of his books, called Catherine ‘so truly the half of her good man that they seem animated by one soul, and that a soul of indefatigable industry and benevolence’. She was, in short, ‘perhaps the only female on Earth who could have suited him exactly’.
Catherine worked tirelessly to preserve her husband’s legacy after he died in 1827, continuing to print and colour the books of poetry for which he is best remembered today, before leaving the remainder of his works to the artist Frederick Tatham (for whom she had been nominally working as a housekeeper) on her own death in 1831. Tatham was one of the Shoreham Ancients, a group of young men who became dedicated followers of Blake in his latter years, exalting his bold imagination and spiritual powers. It is no coincidence that Catherine’s role has been conveniently elided from the heroic myth the Ancients created of their idol, who, in their eyes, had pursued his vocation in brave isolation, defying the folly of a society that had failed to recognise his brilliance. That Blake was ahead of his time is no longer in doubt, but he was also a man who lived in the real world, who suffered and loved like the rest of us, and who – as the Tate exhibition shows – was never truly alone.
‘William Blake’ is at Tate Britain from 11 September to 2 February 2020.