7 April 2005

The William Blake Archive <www.blakearchive.org> is pleased to announce
the publication of the electronic edition of Blake's 116 water-color
illustrations to Thomas Gray's poems. These 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 designs for Gray's poems are among Blake's major achievements as an
illustrator. They were commissioned in 1797 by Blake's friend, the
sculptor John Flaxman, as a gift for his wife Ann, to whom Blake addressed
the poem that ends the series. The commission may have been inspired by
the Flaxmans' seeing Blake's water-color designs to Edward Young's _Night
Thoughts_, begun in 1795. The Gray illustrations follow the same basic
format. Blake cut windows in large sheets of paper and mounted in these
windows the texts of Gray's poems from a 1790 letterpress edition. Blake
then drew and colored his designs surrounding the printed texts. Although
listed by William Michael Rossetti in his catalogue of Blake's drawings
and paintings, published in the 1863 and 1880 editions of Alexander
Gilchrist's _Life of William Blake_, the Gray illustrations were virtually
unknown until their rediscovery by Herbert Grierson in 1919. They are now
among the Blake treasures at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven,
Connecticut.

Blake's illustrations respond to Gray's poems in a variety of ways, but
always with respect for the specifics in the text. Many motifs are
visualizations-and hence literalizations-of Gray's metaphoric images. The
Gray illustrations share iconographic and stylistic similarities with the
Night Thoughts designs; both series are indebted to the pictorial imagery
Blake developed in his illuminated books of the early- and mid-1790s. For
the more comic passages in Gray's poems, Blake deployed a broad, almost
caricature-like style. Many of the designs emphasize the imagination at
work in the world through inspired acts of reading, writing, and
performing music.

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,
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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