William Blake

William Blake was a London poet, painter and printmaker, apprenticed to an engraver, who earned his living engraving other artists’ designs. He invented a method of relief etching to print his own illuminated books, in which words and pictures are made together and coloured by hand, among them Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Jerusalem. His visionary watercolours and colour prints, such as Newton and The Ancient of Days, were little valued in his lifetime but are now seen as central to British Romanticism. Tate Britain holds the largest collection of his art, and the British Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum also have major holdings.