William Blake and the Art of Engraving

Mei-Ying Sung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317314257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

Sung closely examines William Blake's extant engraved copper plates and arrives at a new interpretation of his working process. Sung suggests that Blake revised and corrected his work more than was previously thought. This belies the Romantic ideal that the acts of conception and execution are simultaneous in the creative process.

1 The History of the theory of Conception and Execution

Amongst studies of Blake’s etching and engraving techniques on copper, there is no doubt that the most important in recent times are those put forward by Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi. Both of them have dominated discussion of Blake’s printmaking techniques, especially the technique of relief etching. Essick’s William Blake, Printmaker (1980) brings out the artisan’s life of Blake, his profession, his medium and technique. Throughout William Blake, Printmaker, we can see for the first time how Blake worked on copper plates.¹ Essick successfully gives us a clear view of the life Blake lived as a professional engraver and printmaker under the general public taste of the eighteenth century, and his struggle to move from being an ordinary reproductive printmaker to being an original artist. Following Essick’s practical and detailed research, Viscomi’s influential Blake and the Idea of the Book has similarly become one of the most indispensable books for Blake studies. Working apparently increasingly interdependently, at least after William Blake, Printmaker, Essick and Viscomi have had intellectual collaboration and shared similar ideas. Their argument for the unity of invention (or conception) and execution has also become widely known,² and cannot be ignored by anyone studying Blake’s copper plates and techniques.

The theory of the unity of invention and execution is subtly presented in Essick but pushed to the extreme by Viscomi. This is most clearly expressed in Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993):

With the exception of Experience, Blake left virtually no manuscripts of illuminated poems, let alone fair copies of them. … Like tracings in the production of an engraving drafts of poems appearing on illuminated plates may have been discarded after serving their purpose, replaced by the ‘printed manuscripts’. The poems – or at least the minor and major prophecies, texts whose forms were not externally structured by rhyme schemes and ballad forms – may have been composed just as the illustrations were, spontaneously and almost automatically. As persuasively demonstrated by Essick in Blake and the Language of Adam, Blake’s mode of literary production responsible for the prophecies was much as Blake himself described it – unpremeditated. Essick shows why Blake’s metaphor of ‘dictation’ was not mere topos, and how oral formulas and Blake’s aesthetic of uniting invention and execution made it technically possible for Blake to write, as Blake told Butts, ‘twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against [his] Will’ (E 729). Because illuminated printing and oral-formulaic poetry are both autographic, they technically could have occurred concurrently.³

It is clear throughout his book that Visomi’s assumption is that illuminated printing represents undivided labour, unified invention and execution, and unconventional production.⁴ Yet the assumption is extended to the whole of Blake’s printmaking so that his readers hardly notice that it only covers the relief etched illuminated books and not his engravings, which were Blake’s main career output.

Similarly, Essick says in his William Blake, Printmaker that Blake’s graphic techniques (for relief etching in particular) are themselves claimed to possess intrinsic meaning as ‘activities of mind’.⁵ In Essick’s words, ‘when Blake exaggerates these commercial techniques and raises them so far above the threshold of vision that they replace representational forms and become that which is represented’.⁶ In short, ‘graphic method becomes part of verbal message’.⁷ With ‘method’ becoming ‘message’, Essick’s effort of building ‘conception’ into Blake’s ‘execution’ is clearly seen. His discussion of technique (the execution) is working towards the theory that Blake as an artist chose the technique with his mind, not as an artisan controlled by the mechanical. We should note, however, the word ‘execution’ here is restricted to relief etching, a technique which Essick and Viscomi noticeably privilege.

Essick’s tendency to emphasize relief etching leads to the implication that Blake used it as his most successful way of combining invention and execution. After his return from Felpham to London in 1803, Essick claims Blake ‘return[ed] to his earlier graphic innovations as a means for communicating his renewed vision’.⁸ By this, Essick means the relief etching of both text and design. In the letter to Thomas Butts of 10 January 1803, Blake wrote he had resumed his ‘primitive & original ways of Execution in both painting & engraving’ (E 724). Essick is certain that ‘by this Blake must have meant relief etching’.⁹ Essick’s theory of Blake’s ‘unity of invention and execution’ is more fully presented in William Blake and the Language of Adam. Although William Blake and the Language of Adam is not particularly concerned with Blake’s craft techniques, it is clear that the preconditions for his interpretation of Blake were established and laid out in the primary work done for William Blake, Printmaker. In chapter 4, ‘Language and Modes of Production’, Essick argues that, for Blake, there is ‘no distinction between the source of conception and the medium of its execution: the medium is the origin’.¹⁰ This is taking the cue from Blake’s words that ‘Invention depends Altogether upon Execution or Organization’ (E 637) in his annotations to Reynolds’s Discourses, and his antipathy to ‘the pretended Philosophy which teaches that Execution is the power of One & Invention of Another’ (E 699). Although William Blake and the Language of Adam does not refer much to Blake’s copper plates or practical techniques, it is based on the practical ground of his earlier research, and its influence has been continuing for more than a decade. In Essick’s theory, the ‘spontaneous’ and the ‘immediate’ played a major role in Blake’s inspiration of poetry as well as his pictorial production.¹¹

However, the theory about Blake’s execution and conception was not Essick and Viscomi’s invention. It has a long history back in the early Blake studies and an artistic and literary background in the early twentieth century. This chapter will show how the Essick/Viscomi thesis of the unity of invention and execution in Blake’s relief etching is actually a later incarnation of early twentieth-century idealizations of automatic writing developed by 1930s and 40s Surrealists including, most notably, the Blake scholar Ruthven Todd who not only carried out reconstructive experiments (as Essick and Viscomi acknowledge) but who had close links with major Surrealist printmakers who were enthusiastic about the possibilities of automatic writing. The certainty with which Viscomi both assents to, and validates, Essick’s preliminary work is notable. As quoted before, Viscomi wrote in Blake and the Idea of the Book that ‘Essick shows in William Blake and the Language of Adam why Blake’s metaphor of “dictation” was not mere topos … Blake’s aesthetic of uniting invention and execution made it possible to write, as Blake told Butts … “without Premeditation” … Because illuminated poetry and oral-formulaic poetry are both autographic, they technically could have occurred concurrently’.¹² Ruthven Todd’s Surrealist friends would have heartily agreed. While Joan Miró, William Hayter and, of course, Ruthven Todd actually experimented directly in reconstructing Blake’s methods of relief etching, Blake was already a much-celebrated figure amongst Surrealists fascinated by what they called, ultimately derived from their understanding of Sigmund Freud, ‘automatic writing’. The Essick/Viscomi thesis is not without its own, unacknowledged, genealogy in Surrealist practices.

Ruthven Todd (1914–78), has been widely recognized as an important early twentieth-century scholar by Blake critics and collectors such as Keynes, Robertson, Bentley and others. Among scholarly circles around the time of the Second World War and during the post-war period, Todd was well known for his enthusiasm about Blake’s materials. Todd’s re-editing of Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1942) started his research work on Blake. His contributions to Blake studies are mainly material studies with exhaustive tracing of historical details. These can be found not only in his notes for the Life of William Blake, including published and unpublished manuscripts at Leeds University, his books Tracks in the Snow: Studies in English Science and Art (1946) and William Blake: the Artist (1971) but also in his extensive correspondence with many contemporary Blake scholars. Among them, Lt.-Col. W. E. Moss was especially important as a major collector of Blake’s works as well as on account of his own studies of Blake. The correspondence between Moss and Todd reveals the exchange of ideas and sharing of interests. One crucial item originally in Moss’s collection is the unique fragment of the etched copper plate America plate a (NGA), which came to Todd’s attention and inspired his experiments in 1947. Todd was obviously animated by Moss’s experiments in printing from this etched plate, as well as Graham Robertson’s experiments with colour printing from millboard. This chapter will show the history and relationship of these early Blake scholars and how Todd played a central role as an influential figure. The chapter will also throw new light on the neglected figure of Moss whose crucial role in Blake studies still needs fuller research.

It is rarely mentioned in Blake studies that the other, very different, part of Todd’s life distinct from the academic world of Blake scholarship was his involvement in the Surrealist movement. Todd’s involvement with the Surrealists has never been recognized as having any significance in relation to his Blake studies, but these two worlds of Todd coincided in the 1940s. Long preceding the post-war impetus to academic study given by the publication of Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947) and David V. Erdman’s Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954), Blake was a popular name during the important 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, which was also a significant encounter between Todd and the Surrealists. There are many surprising similarities between Blake’s theory of conception and execution and the Surrealist manifestos. As the Surrealists found their echoes in Blake and other preceding artists’ works, Surrealism in turn influenced Blake scholars through Todd’s relationship with the artists from the group.

Stanley William Hayter (1901–88), a prominent British printmaker of the twentieth century, was associated with the Surrealist group much earlier than Todd. His printmaking workshop, Atelier 17, was a major influence on many eminent modern artists, including Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. With his new methods of engraving, Hayter spread Surrealist ideas of automatism and of the subconscious during the 1930s and 40s. It was in the workshop of Atelier 17, re-established in New York after moving from Paris, that Todd cooperated with Hayter and Miró in an experimental reconstruction of Blake’s processes of relief etching and printing.¹³ The similarity between Surrealist automatism and Blake’s idea of the unity of invention and execution strongly suggests a connection between Surrealism, Todd’s experiments and the one-pull theory of Essick and Viscomi. Hayter was known as a strongly philosophical artist, one who held considered theories about his artistic practices.¹⁴ Although experiments attempting to reconstruct Blake’s methods carried out by Todd, Hayter and Miró derive from Hayter’s professional experience of printmaking, there was also an ideology behind the idea of automatism in Surrealism which led their practice.

Despite their expertise in printmaking and Blake studies, the experiments of Todd, Hayter and Miró were largely discounted by Essick and Viscomi. The latter two reconstructed Todd’s experiments but claimed that Todd was wrong in saying Blake used transfer techniques because Todd doubted Blake’s ability to do mirror writing.¹⁵ Essick and Viscomi established their authority with powerful argument and historical and practical evidence. Nevertheless, Essick and Viscomi’s notion of Blake’s unity of invention and execution, and his one-pull printing process, appear to have been inherited from Todd and his Surrealist background without acknowledgement.

The origin of one-pull and two-pull theories derives from Frederick Tatham and W. Graham Robertson.¹⁶ Both theories have little solid ground of proof. Robertson’s assertion of multiple printing was based on his own artistic observations; while Tatham’s description of Blake using one-pull method on his colour prints was from his fallible memory of distant conversations, bearing in mind that he was only three years old when Blake made his Large Colour Prints in 1795.

The analysis of technique presented by Essick and Viscomi has its own history, which has been overlooked. Although Essick and Viscomi make reference to the experiments of etching and printing carried out by Ruthven Todd in the 1940s, they share with Todd a curious belief in the power...