Kenneth Clark on William Blake

Personal revelation also has an insidious effect on illustration. Clark on the appalling visions of William Blake.

"Everybody who writes about Blake begins by saying that he was a

visionary. It is a vague term. Artists, even the most realistic, start

from some kind of vision – that is what leads them to select what they

need from the infinite diversity of appearances.

But with Blake the word vision has a more precise meaning. He did not draw from

nature because, as he said repeatedly, his visions were clearer and

more vivid than his optical perception of the world around him. He

saw these visions as a child; saw God put his head in at the window,

saw the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree at Peckham Rye. There is

nothing extraordinary in this; many imaginative children have

similar experiences. What is exceptional is that Blake kept these

intense powers of visualisation after the age of puberty. Exceptional,

but not incredible, because this can be paralleled in other forms of

mental activity. Some people have the gift of total recall and others

can renumber accurately whole pages of figures; physiologically

these endowments seem to me quite as hard to explain as the accurate

visualisation of images.

“What was the nature of Blake's visions? His accounts of them sug-

gest that, although obviously closely related, they were of several

different kinds. The first was simply his poetic faculty that led him

to see a natural event as something supernatural. 'It will be ques-

taoned', he says in his Descriptive Catalogue, 'when the sun rises do

you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea – Oh no, no,

1 see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying “Holy?

holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty”. The seventeenth-century

poets, Traherne or Vaughan, might have said the same. The second

was when an analogy became so strong in his mind that an ordinary

experience was transformed: 'With my inward eye 'tis an old man

grey. To my outward a thistle across the way.' These lines show

that Blake was capable of switching from one kind of vision to another

out of course Blake's pictures in the fire' are far more precise than

ours.

This leads us to visions of rather a different order which seem to

have involved an element of hallucination. They are described in

detail by Varley and Linell, in whose presence Blake drew a number

of what are known as 'visionary heads' One must remember

that Varley was an early spiritualist and he encouraged Blake to

draw these heads in the middle of the night and in an atmosphere

rather like that of a mediumistic séance. He was requested to draw

the likeness of William Wallace, says Linell, 'the eyes of Blake

sparkled, for he admired heroes. “William Wallace,” he exclaimed,

“I see him now, there, there, how noble he looks – reach me my

things.”Having drawn for some time with the same ease of hand

and steadiness of eye as if a living sitter had been before him, Blake

said: 'I cannot finish him, Edward the First has stepped in between

him and me.'

There was an element of clairvoyance in his work, but the

visions that make his best work unforgettable were somewhere

between the poetic analogy of the rising sun and the literal reality of

the heads.