William Blake Posters and Art Prints
curriculum enrichment resources for classroom, home schoolers, inspirational decor.

William Blake biography:

William Blake (b. 11-28-1757 in London; d. 8-12-1827) an English poet, painter, and engraver, who saw the disciplines of literature and art as “companions in a unified spiritual endeavors”, was one of the earliest and greatest figures of Romanticism. Often thought of as mad, Blake saw visions of angels as a child and God's head “put into a window” as an adult, a vision that “set (him) ascreaming”.

William Blake's parents were supportive of his artistic talent and he was apprenticed to an engraver at the age of fourteen. He began to write and publish his own books when he was twenty-six. Blake's most famous book of poems, “Songs of Innocence”, which appeared in 1789, was written, printed, engraved, and bound by the artist himself, with the aid of his wife Catherine.

Although Blake never left England, he studied the work of Michelangelo and the Italian Mannerists from a large collection of engravings, and he was one of several artists influenced by Henry Fuseli, an Anglo-Swiss painter who worshipped Shakespeare and Michelangelo. Blake, for his part, was devoted to the Bible, to Dante, and to Milton. He also admired the medieval period and conceived of his own books as eighteenth-century successors to the illuminated manuscripts of the medieval monks. His work is religious or mystical in expression and romantic in spirit. It is full of movement, flickering or glaring light, medieval symbols, and mannerist musculature and arrangement.

William Blake was associated with the leading intellectuals of England - the scientist Joseph Priestley, the American Revolutionary Thomas Paine, and as close friends with Mary Wollestonecraft; he also shared great hopes for both the American and French Revolutions with William Wordsworth.

Blake was noted for his scrupulous honesty and resisted all offers of patronage by the rich, preferring to work independently, though in poverty. Until 1818 he was comparatively unknown in England when one of his disciples organized a group who bought Blake's drawings and helped secure commissions for The Book of Job and The Divine Comedy. Blake completing only seven engraving of the one hundred watercolors he had made for the latter before he died at the age of 69.

William Blake posters and fine art prints include images “Ancient of Days”, “Angels Hovering Over the Body of Jesus in the Sepulchre”, “The Circle of the Lustful (The Whirlwind of the Lovers)”, “God Judging Adam”, “Beatrice Addressing Dante” and several motivational posters featuring quotes from William Blake's writing.