19 November 2003
The William Blake Archive <www.blakearchive.org> is pleased to
announce the publication of the electronic edition of Blake's
illustrations to Robert Blair's _The Grave_, accompanied by the related
separate plate of _Deaths Door_. Both are presented in our Preview mode,
one that provides all the features of the Archive except Image Search and
Inote (our image annotation program).
The illustrations to _The Grave_ are among Blake's most important
commissions for commercially published book illustrations. The engraver
and would-be publisher R. H. Cromek hired Blake to illustrate Blair's
popular "Graveyard" poem in 1805. Blake produced one design, _Deaths
Door_, as a white-line etching, but Cromek found this so unsatisfactory
that he quickly turned to the fashionable engraver Louis Schiavonetti to
etch and engrave twelve of Blake's illustrations. These were published,
along with a frontispiece portrait of Blake included in our electronic
edition, in 1808. Blake's reputation as an artist through the first half
of the nineteenth century was based largely on these images.
As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access
restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible
through the continuing support of the Library of Congress, the Institute
for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia,
by a major grant from the Preservation and Access Division of the National
Endowment for the Humanities, by the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, and by the cooperation of the international array of
libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to
reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.
Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Andrea Laue, technical editor
The William Blake Archive
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