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I am writing these articles for people who can’t get to the Exhibitions: dwellers in the far-flung; young mothers without baby-sitters; carers of the capricious old; agoraphobics; those who daren’t trust themselves to trains; or disqualified from driving; in prison or hospital beds. And the bone idle.

   We enter Blake’s world by way of his apprenticeship to the engraver Basire, who sent him, aged 16 or 17, to draw the monuments in Westminster Abbey. At once we see the boy was industrious and thorough. His drawings of the oval faced Queen Eleanor, the square faced queen Philippa and the bearded King Edward III speak of honesty and lack of affectation. Blake was awestruck by Gothic art and recorded its formalisations faithfully. These studies conditioned his future practice. The elongated forms of the Gothic became imprinted in his mind, as did the muscular ones of Michelangelo, to surface later metabolised into his personal visions. Blake worked always from the internalised image. Among other early works are illustrations to Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ and some verses by Thomas Gray. These drawings remain in the page-borders, subordinate to the text. But already his fishes are human fish, his crouching cat is a human cat and some dormant roots stir into human life. To Blake all life aspired to the condition of humanity.
  
   But let us hurry on towards the mature works where Blake is illustrating his own texts, and word and picture are equal, as in the ‘Book of Thel’ and ‘America’, works of the happy decade in Lambeth. But it was not until 1804, when William was over forty that he came into his full strength. He had spent three years at Felpham, near the Sussex coast, where he had learned – by trying to please his well-intentioned patron Hayley – that to neglect your own vision for the sake of artistical odd-jobs can only be destructive. So, on his return to live in South Molton Street near “mournful, everweeping Oxford street” it was the commissions he tended to neglect while he wrote, designed and printed ‘Milton’ and ‘Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion’. While doing this he sank into considerable poverty, but though he was occasionally angry, even paranoid over stolen ideas and treacherous publishers, this state of affairs was the lesser evil.

   After seventeen years William and Catherine moved to Fountain Court, off the Strand, and a happier time ensued, for he had been discovered, and was admired and encouraged by a group of young artists: Varley, Linnell, Richmond, Calvert, Samuel Palmer and others who used to visit him, and even commission him. It was at the beginning of this time, the 1820s, that Blake made the small woodcuts for Thornton’s ‘Virgil’ which inspired the young Palmer. In 1824 Linnell commissioned the Dante series that Blake was working on when he died.

   A few lines by Blake are written up on the gallery walls, above the exhibits. On one is written: “The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by Poverty and Obscurity”, and over the assembled Dante drawings Blake declares: “Dante saw devils where I see none. I see only good.” Blake could not see why Paolo and Francesca should be thrust into Hell simply for loving, and his ‘Capaneus the Blasphemer’ sits on his white-hot couch and is bombarded by thunderbolts while keeping serenely cool. Blake understood the necessity for “blasphemy” when the rich and powerful are insisting on their own versions of every truth.

   Among the Biblical pictures are ‘Adam naming the Beasts’ and ‘Eve naming the Birds’. The Adam is not unlike William and I cannot help seeing Blake’s suntanned Eve as the vision imprinted in his soul of the dark-haired, dark-eyed and ardent young Catherine Boucher who became his wife. To my eyes she emerges from history as a heroine. That she was illiterate when she married doesn’t mean that she was stupid. A stupid woman would have ruined Blake’s life, for stupidity is jealous and destructive. She may not have been taught to read, but she could read character and understood Blake’s worth. She had learned to sew for she made William’s shirts. Her market-gardener father taught her some gardening, so that she could trim the vine and grow grapes in the garden at Lambeth, and William taught her to read and to draw, to work the press and make prints, and hand-colour them too. In the Wife’s Corner of this show there is a drawing by Catherine of her husband as she remembered him in his youth, and it is not the work of a dull mind. She said that William used to visit her every day, after his death, so he had taught her to see visions too.

   Dominating the central room of the exhibition is a wooden press with a heavy iron roller at its heart. It would have been worked by the vertical windlass that appears across the surrounding glass-topped cases like a dark red fallen star. This piece of equipment would have taken up the space of a dining-table in each of the Blake’s lodgings, and as most of their homes were a matter of one or two rooms, the business of living must have gone on around the imaginative world’s borders.

   Among the supplementary exhibits is Albrecht Durer’s ‘Melancholia’. Blake much admired this work, and kept a copy hanging close by his engravers’ desk. In it the Angel of Melancholy broods morosely. Her animal (a hound) is asleep, her cupid sulks, the toys of reason hang useless on the wall and the tools of practical work lie scattered on the floor. A pair of compasses are motionless in the angel’s lap. All is inert. Nothing can compensate her for the meaninglessness of the measured world beside the infinite ocean visible beyond her habitat. It is Reason that has brought this state about, and Blake always kept this realisation close to his heart.

   The ‘Job Sequence’ hangs nearby. Blake has a quarrel with the Book of Job, for he sees Satan as the energetic force that shakes Job’s smugness with suffering and teaches him positive rather than negative virtue. In the first place the Job family is prosperous but joyless. Their musical instruments hang, unplayed, on the tree, and the foreground is filled with somnolent sheep. In the last plate the instruments are being played, for Job has learned that true prayer is joyful praise.

   Though I set out to write something that might compensate dwellers in the Outer Hebrides for being unable to reach the Blake show, there can be no substitute for seeing the full-page pictures that belong to ‘Jerusalem’. The title page is beautiful with the beauty of nature, while the last page – the picture of the reunion of Jerusalem with Christ – is one of the great spiritual pictures of humankind. It is comparable to Rembrandt’s ‘Return of the Prodigal Son’ that hangs in the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg. It would be worth anyone’s while to fly to Russia and see the Rembrandt, and – realising the limitations of words – it would be just as worth while to make the much more difficult journey from the Hebrides to see the Blakes.