Recognized today as one of the greatest British artists of the late 18th century, William Blake produced art that was neither appreciated nor understood by many people of his time.
William Blake’s childhood vision on Peckham Rye is well known. Sauntering along, he looks up and, according to an early biographer, ‘sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars’. On another occasion, he ran indoors declaring he had seen the prophet Ezekiel under a tree. His wife, Catherine, later reported that Blake first saw God at the age of four. I love that ‘first’.
The Bible’s vivid prophetic and visceral apocalyptic imagery stirred him as well. It ‘overawed his imagination’ so that ‘he saw it materialising around him,’ Peter Ackroyd reports in his biography