A brief tour through some of Blake’s personal mythology, as depicted in his paintings. With explanations.
painting
He took the Salon of 1864 by storm, but was barely noticed with 2 more paintings the following year. Why?
Many of the great painters have been migrants. Here are examples from Canaletto to Sargent. Suppress migration, and art will be stifled.
Decoding one of Blake’s paintings enables its reading: an obscure author of devotional texts takes us on a tour of different variants of God.
Some stories sound plausible, but are problematic when you try to paint or photograph them. Here’s a good example, with attempted solutions by Reni, Rubens, Moreau, and others.
Three major paintings, each very ambitious, but abandoned, reworked, and abandoned again, give insight into his progress in changing history painting.
A selection of paintings showing Blake’s strength in design beyond normal artistic composition – a very modern feature.
Moreau’s extraordinary paintings have been described as Symbolist, Decadent, even Surrealist. They are notoriously difficult to read – here is some help.
This extraordinary series of watercolours to illustrate the apocalyptic visions in the Book of Revelation is among Blake’s most brilliant.
The final group of charcoal drawings brings disaster and redemption, with increasingly rich detail and symbolism.
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