THE PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS OF WILLIAM BLAKE by Martin ButlinReview by: JOHN HAYESJournal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 130, No. 5313 (AUGUST 1982), pp. 594-595Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41373435 .

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JOURNAL Oř THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS GENERAL NOTES 42. Memoir of William Newton, Proc. Inst. Civil Engineers, Vol. 21

(1861-2), pp. 592-3. 43. Bennet Woodcroft, Alphabetical Index of Patentees of Inventions, officially published 1854, commercially reprinted 1969.

44. Memoir ot William Newton, op. cit. Against tne prominent standing held by the Newtons as patent agents should be placed their continuing business as manufacturers and vendors of globes and optical instruments. At the 1851 Exhibition, 'Wm. Newton & Son, Manufacturers' displayed a variety of terrestrial and celestrial globes, orreries and a sun dial, while W. E. & F. Newton of the same address - '3, Fleet-street, Temple-bar and 66, Chancery-lane (Manufactory)' - advertised themselves in the Official Catalogue as globe manufacturers to Her Majesty and vendors of telescopes, medical and other microscopes, opera glasses, magic lanterns and dissolving view apparatus. For most, if not all, of those who practised as patent agents in 1851 and for many years to follow patents formed only a part of business activities.

45. Obituary Notice, William Marwick Micheli, The Engineer, Vol. 59 (1885), p. 238. Quotation extracted from unpublished official report on Patent Office. In 1872 a young man working with Micheli at the Patent Office left to edit the Journal of the Society of Arts and later to become the Society's Secretary; this was Henry Trueman Wood.

WINSTON CHURCHILL TRAVELLING FELLOWSHIPS 1983 The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust is once again offering a number of travelling Fellowships, to be taken up in 1983. The object is to enable those who

would not otherwise have the opportunity, to gain a better understanding of the lives and work of people in countries overseas and bring back useful knowledge and experience for the benefit of our community in the British Isles. About 100 awards are made each year, and they are open to all citizens of the UK of any age or occupation. No special educational or professional qualifications are needed. Grants are offered in different categories each year. Amongst those covered this year are natural history and conservation of the environ- ment; gardeners and garden history; emergency ser- vices - ambulance, fire, rescue, etc.; weavers and workers in wool, lace and leather; sewage, water and flood control workers; musical instrument makers; the prevention of crime and violence on transport services. Those wishing to apply should send their name and

address only, on a postcard, between August and mid- October to the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, 15 Queen's Gate Terrace, London SW7 5PR. They will in return receive an explanatory leaflet and a form to complete, which must reach the Trust office by 27th October 1982. Final selection for the awards will be made by interview in London in January 1983.

NOTES ON BOOKS

THE PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS OF WILLIAM BLAKE By Martin Butlin New Haven and London, Yale University Press (for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art), 1981. 2 vols., £125 Blake was over fifty when, in 1809, he held his first and only exhibition of his work, at his brother's (formerly their parents') house in Soho. As Martin Butlin notes, not a single work was sold and only one, hostile, review has been traced. Both his vision and his style lay too far outside the accepted canons of neo- classical art. Blake's patrons were few but dedicated, the principal being Thomas Butts, a minor civil servant, who seems to have paid Blake a regular wage from about 1799 and who owned nearly a quarter of the works here catalogued, the Reverend Joseph Thomas, who had 'a large acquaintance with Artists', to whom he was introduced by Flaxman, and John Linnell, the painter, thirty-five years younger than Blake, who supported him from 1818 onwards. During the Vic- torian age his work remained similarly unappreciated, though, of the earlier generation, the Rossettis, Monckton Milnes and others were enthusiasts and, from the 1880s, it was collected by the painter and playwright Graham Robertson, part of whose fortune was used by his executors to found the Blake Trust. The Blake revival began in the 1920s with Sir Geof- frey Keynes's first book on him and Foster Damon's analysis of his philosophy and symbols; a centenary exhibition was held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club

in 1927. Blake studies, both in this country and in America, gathered greater momentum in the 1950s and the veritable flood of publications shows little sign of abating. Martin Butlin, who joined the staff of the Tate

Gallery in 1955, has been a student of Blake for twenty- five years, and selected and catalogued the great exhibition at the Tate in 1978. The present catalogue is the culmination of his intensive research on the artist; and it is a catalogue rather than a book because, as Mr. Butlin has remarked, with Blake 'one gets to know the whole through the details'. Originally to have been published, substantially unillustrated, for the Blake Trust, it is the latest in Yale's series of cata- logues raisonnes of British artists with accompany- ing volumes of plates reproducing each item. The catalogue comprises all of Blake's paintings, water- colours, drawings and separate colour prints, but not his illuminated books nor his monochrome engrav- ings, which previously have been catalogued by other scholars. The arrangement is roughly chronological, with divisions into sections devoted to different topics, Works done at the Instigation of William Hay ley, c. 1800-1805, Illustrations to the Bible Painted for Thomas Butts, c. 1 799-1809, and so on, each with introductory notes. The entries, numbering nearly nine hundred, not counting sub-entries (for example, there are five hundred and thirty-seven illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts, No. 330), are meticulous, and set a standard for the concise deployment of data (so comprehensive as to extend to watermarks on

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AUGUST 1982 NOTES ON BOOKS mounts where relevant, and to the prices paid at auc- tion) and for the clear analysis of sometimes complex evidence. There are a subject and title index and a general index which includes the names of present and past owners. Here, then, is a vast and definitive refer- ence work upon which scholars may depend for reliable information and level-headed discussion, the last not always characteristic of Blake studies.

However, if this catalogue provides the answers to a host of potential questions about William Blake, there are some to which it does not, and arguably sensibly so. A full account of the circumstances of a com- mission, exactitude as to media, identification of subject-matter, elucidation of iconography and pos- sible symbolism, the citation of other scholars' views on the last two topics, all these will be found. Mr. Butlin is concerned to provide a bed-rock of factual and incontrovertible information about Blake's work and imagination. But one aspect not in most cases ex- plored, except to cite published opinions, is the ques- tion of Blake's sources. Mr. Butlin has pointed out elsewhere that Blake possessed an exceptional visual memory, and so long ago as 1943 Anthony Blunt established the precise sources in earlier art for a number of the artist's Visions'. Further identifications and examples of transmutations of imagery would have been welcome, though to have pursued these consistently would have involved entering areas of discussion where demonstration might be far from certain, and it was perhaps wise to hold back. Inter- pretation is a far more difficult achievement than com- pilation, but of its nature more transitory. Mr. Butlin has also eschewed the intrusion of his own interpreta- tion of Blake through his decision not to write an introduction to the whole work; for this (as well as for a chronology) one must turn to the catalogue of the Tate Gallery exhibition, compiled for a non-specialist audience. A bibliography is not included (there is a key to abbreviations employed in the catalogue entries which runs to seven pages) since three Blake biblio- graphies already exist. Let us be clear. There is nothing in the preparation of this catalogue that has not been carefully thought out: indeed the author has gone into print on the subject of cataloguing William Blake. In its intellectual rigour as well as its erudition this is one of the most remarkable books ever pub- lished about a British artist, fully justifying the phrase 'monumental study' used on the dust-jacket. The illustrations, of which nearly a quarter (not 'a

large proportion', as stated in the blurb) are in colour, seem, on the whole, to be reasonably good, and there are nearly twelve hundred of them. But the publishers have not faced up to the problem of how to make a mammoth reference work such as this easy to handle. Each volume weighs something like half a stone. Already one of mine has split at the spine.

JOHN HAYES

THE HUMAN FACE OF GOD: WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE BOOK OF JOB By Kathleen Raine London, Thames and Hudson, 1982. £20 In 1823, according to his biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, William Blake was on the verge of want, and but for the timely help of his young friend, the artist John Linnell, might have starved. As it was, on the strength of a set of water-colours illustrating the story of Job he had made for Thomas Butts, Linnell commissioned Blake to engrave a set of plates of the same subjects, paying him a total of £1 50 for the work - £50 more than had originally been agreed; it was a larger sum than Blake had ever received before for a set of engravings. The engraved Illustrations of the Book of Job, published in 1825, are considered by many to be Blake's masterpiece. There have been several critical studies of these

engravings, including those by S. Foster Damon (1966) and Bo Lindberg (1973); they even inspired a ballet, Job, based on a scenario by Geoffrey Keynes, first produced in London in 193 1 . Excellent facsimiles have been published and a new set of facsimiles of the engravings and of the water-colours is at present in preparation by the William Blake Trust. Kathleen Raine has now added what is the best

book so far written on the inner meaning of the Job engravings. It follows her previous valuable contribu- tions to Blake scholarship, in which she explored Blake's debts to the classical world and to neo-classicism, to Swedenborgianism, to Jacob Bryant, to Jacob Boehme, and to many other sources. She now convin- cingly relates these to the Job engravings, opening hitherto unsuspected nuances which she explores with searching detail. Unlike that of so many present-day Blake critics and

commentators, Dr. Raine's prose is limpid and easy to follow. Not for her the turgid private language of so much Blake comment; she has a message to give, and imparts it with clarity. Yet this is not an easy book. It demands a high level of scholarship from the reader, and much patience. Dr. Raine takes each of the engravings in turn, discussing it and its underlying content in detail, and rounds off the study with an essay in which she discusses the similarities and differ- ences between Blake's approach to Job and that of C. G. Jung in his Answer to Job (1954).

It is necessary in a study of this kind to remember that Blake's engravings are essentially works of art, and not mere proselytizing diagrams or emblems. They are that, too, but it is the setting of the message in a magnificent work of art that gives it its power. This, I think, is a dimension in which Dr. Raine's study could be improved. She is right to concentrate on the quality of what Blake called 'that greatest of all blessings, a strong imagination'; but added to this is the form in which the imagination is expressed, and the technique by which that form is forged. These

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