1757 -1827 · London, poetry, engraving and romantic vision

Cosmic bodies, prophets in tension and colors of fire make William Blake one of the most radical creators of European romanticism.

William Blake was born in London in 1757 and died there in 1827. Poet, designer, painter, engraver and printer, he refused to separate the word from the image and built throughout his life a personal mythology of dizzying coherence. As a child, he claims to see angels and spiritual presences. He studied drawing with Henry Pars, became an apprentice to the engraver James Basire then entered the schools of the Royal Academy. The Gothic tombs of Westminster, Michelangelo, Raphael, Dürer and the Bible nourished a language of powerful contours, monumental bodies and visionary space. With his wife Catherine Boucher, who helped him print and color his sheets, Blake invented the late 1780s relief engraving. This process allows him to write, draw, bite, print and sometimes paint each page of his illuminated books himself. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Europe, America or Jerusalem combine poetry, prophecy and criticism of political, religious and industrial oppression. In Newton, the scholar folds over his compass and measures a world that he no longer sees in its entirety: Blake does not reject science, but reason when it claims to exhaust the imagination. Elohim creating Adam gives muscular and painful strength to the birth of man. The spiritual forms of Nelson and Pitt transform two historical figures into mythical powers confronting Leviathan and Behemoth. Blake also illustrates Job, Milton and, at the end of his life, Dante's Divine Comedy. Little recognized and often poor, he remains faithful to absolute independence. His work gives a plastic form to the invisible and affirms that imagination is not an escape from reality, but a force capable of judging and transforming it. His work gives a plastic form to the invisible and affirms that imagination is not an escape from reality, but a force capable of judging and transforming it. His work gives a plastic form to the invisible and affirms that imagination is not an escape from reality, but a force capable of judging and transforming it. His work gives a plastic form to the invisible and affirms that imagination is not an escape from reality, but a force capable of judging and transforming it. The selection "William Blake" notably compares Newton and Elohim creating Adam. His reading favors details.

For Blake, seeing means crossing appearance: the body, the flame and the line become the organs of a free imagination.