William Blake refused to limit himself to one creative act; instead, he was author, illustrator, publisher and distributor of his work, retaining complete control over his output. In the process, he merged image and text in inventive ways, at once invoking motifs from the past and carving out his own novel methods. On a recent sunny Tuesday, as I meandered around the Yale Center for British Art with curators Elizabeth Wyckoff and Timothy Young, I saw the poet and painter’s imaginative capacity articulated in various forms in “William Blake: Burning Bright.”
Two iconic works kick off the show. Spread open in a vitrine, a miniature copy of The Gates of Paradise opens to an illustration of a child propping a ladder to the moon, foregrounding the work’s aspirational theme. To the right hangs Virgin and Child, which exemplifies Blake’s “fresco painting,” a merging of Italian egg tempera and ancient wall techniques, Wyckoff explained.
Born in Soho, London, to a hosier father, Blake didn’t receive proper schooling. He was an autodidact who frequently absorbed knowledge by wandering around and experiencing strange visions. Later, he apprenticed for an engraving master, which led to his creation of his own “infernal method” of engraving.
The exhibition title is a nod to a line from Blake’s seminal “The Tyger” in his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which features sets of companion poems in which he juxtaposes innocent verses of childhood with related poems tinged by adulthood or corruption (“The Tyger,” for example, sits beside “The Lamb.”)
According to Wyckoff, “Burning Bright” took a village to mount, and indeed, it is robust and varied in size and dimension. Young told Observer that chronology dominates the spatial narrative, gesturing at a logical progression in Blake’s career. The exhibition also cleverly suggests comparisons several times, placing together early and later work or different colorations of his illustrations.
“There are no two copies of Innocence and Experience that have the exact same pagination, as far as I know,” Young added, underlining the plurality of Blake’s oeuvre and the unique nature of each of the materials exhibited here. Except for a few loans, most of the work on the walls comes from the Yale Center for British Art’s own collection. The museum’s Blake holdings are vast, exceeding nine hundred paintings, drawings, prints, books and other materials largely assembled by philanthropist Paul Mellon.
One area of the exhibition lets visitors sit and flip through facsimiles of Blake’s works. The quote “The Eye sees more than the heart knows” features prominently on the wall. Moving to the next room, the Poems of Thomas Gray are set within larger watercolor sheets and mounted in glass atop dark pillars. The images engulf the text, each one unique. In “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” color-clad students play in a grassy field, as the terrors of adulthood descend upon them in the forms of unsightly monsters. Some of these works are crowded with small fantastical creatures, recalling medieval manuscript illuminations. But all the works on view are a testament to Blake’s visionary imagination. For him, the figure of the “prophet” was not someone who saw the future but rather someone who saw the present in precise clarity.
The exhibition concludes with Blake’s late masterwork, Jerusalem, and his final project: watercolor illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. He began working on seven of these before his death at age 69. While he certainly had a fan base and the support of certain artists in his lifetime, his fame grew posthumously, and his beliefs about religion and science reducing creativity became more voguish as the Romantic period took Britain by storm. “Burning Bright”’s curators emphasized that Blake was all about keeping imagination alive. As I exited the show, the last image I saw was fitting: a strange and amusing picture of a child wrapped in a cocoon.
“William Blake: Burning Bright” is on view at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven through November 30, 2025.
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