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A drawing by William Blake (1757–1827) relocated, dated, and sourced

Rebecca Marks

 

A drawing of a person lying on the ground Description automatically generated

1 Study of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam attributed to William Blake (1757–1827), c1824–27. Graphite on paper , 25.8 × 36.3 cm. Chris Gayford, London

 

A sketch by William Blake (1757–1827) after Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (Pl 1) has been relocated following the death of its previous owner, the mid-century British artist George Hooper (1910–1994), in 1994. The drawing originates from the collection of John Linnell (1792–1882) and was purchased at auction in 1918 by TR Hooper, George Hooper’s grandfather. Inherited via Joyce Katherine Hooper MBE, Blake’s Adam has since been moved from Surrey to London, where it now resides in the dining room of her great-nephew, the conductor and art collector Chris Gayford. The study is drawn on the verso of an early version of one of the Dante illustrations, a depiction of Minos (Pl 2). Though Butlin does not propose a date for either drawing, it is likely that both sides were completed between 1824 and 1827, when Blake was working on the Dante commission.[1]

 

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2 Sketch for Minos attributed to William Blake (1757–1827), c1824–27. Graphite on paper, 25.8 × 36.3 cm. Chris Gayford, London

 

The drawing is uncharacteristically large for Blake, measuring 25.8 cm wide by 36.3 cm long. It has been visibly restored, with both sections pasted onto a larger piece of paper, leaving a vertical strip of blank space between the left and right sides of the page. Butlin suggests that both sides of Blake’s drawing were at one time obscured by other drawings, leaving the Dante sketch on the recto particularly damaged. I would like to propose a source for this study by Blake, especially since, apart from Butlin’s catalogue entry in 1981, there has been no published work on it, nor any recent record of its whereabouts. Blake’s Adam could not have been studied directly from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, as Blake remained in England his entire life. Unlike his more affluent peers, he didn’t have the means to undertake a Grand Tour. Although a wealthy friend, John Hawkins, considered securing an endowment for Blake in 1783, the plan fell through, and no other travel opportunities emerged.[2] And so Blake’s Adam can only have been derived from a reproductive print.

Although reproductions after Michelangelo’s works were available in 18th-century London, there were relatively few copies of the Creation of Adam specifically in circulation. Scarcely any prints after Michelangelo’s Genesis frescoes had been made in the early modern period, owing to the logistical challenges of copying works on the ceiling.[3] Instead, prints of the large figures on the walls and the groups in the pendentives – such as the Prophets, Sibyls, and Ancestors of Christ – were more common. A particularly useful source for Blake was the booklet of prints by the 16th-century engraver Adamo Scultori (1530–1585), published in 1773 by Carlo Lozzi (Pl 3).[4] This is the source for an earlier series of copies by Blake after Michelangelo’s Sistine figures made between the 1770s and 1790s.[5]

 

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3 Ignudi by Adamo Scultori (1530–1585) after Michelangelo, c1550s. Engraving, 14.0 × 10.2 cm. Royal Academy Library, London

 

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4 Study of Ignudi after Adamo Scultori after Michelangelo by John Linnell (1792–1882), c1829. Graphite on paper, approximately 15.0 × 12.0 cm. Chris Gayford, London

 

Lozzi’s small folio was also known to Blake’s contemporaries: James Barry (1741–1806), for example, made several engravings after Scultori’s copy of the Prophet Jonah in the 1790s. Similarly, John Linnell, Blake’s follower, composed a small sketch after one of Scultori’s Ignudi in 1829 (Pl 4). Interestingly, this sketch was kept alongside Blake’s drawing of Adam in the Linnell family collection and was one of the works purchased by T. R. Hooper in 1918. Though crude in its finish, this small drawing by Linnell nonetheless indicates the popularity of Scultori’s prints and Michelangelo’s general influence on artists in Blake’s circle.

Regarding Blake’s Adam, only one reproductive source corresponds to the composition and dating of Blake’s drawing: the engraving by Domenico Cunego (1727–1803) in Gavin Hamilton’s Schola Italica Picturae, published in large-folio format in 1773 (Pl 5).

 

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5 ‘The Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel’ after Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), 1772. Engraved by Domenico Cunego. Published by Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798). From Gavin Hamilton, Schola Italica picturae… , Romae: [G. Hamilton], 1773. (2°) [Pl. 2]. Medium Engraving and etching. Dimensions 21.7 x 44.5 cm. Photo Royal Academy of Arts, London

 

This collection, containing forty prints after 16th- and 17th-century Italian Masters, was sufficiently popular to go to a second edition after its initial publication. The book exemplifies the syncretic 18th-century taste for Italian art, combining Renaissance with Baroque, Roman with Venetian, and covering a vast period from Fra Bartholomew (1472–1517) to Guido Reni (1575–1642).[6] The first three pages are dedicated to Michelangelo’s Genesis sequence, offering the first highly finished reproductions of the Creation of Adam, Creation of Eve, and Fall and Expulsion. Hamilton’s Picturae provided the only professional, complete, panoramic reproduction of the Creation available to Blake. Further proof that Blake’s Adam derives from Hamilton’s Picturae can be found within the drawing itself. The foliage in the bottom left of Blake’s study shows that it can only be taken from Cunego’s engraving, as this detail is unique to that version.

In 1773, shortly after Hamilton’s folio had been published, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) wrote to Benjamin West (1738–1820) asking where he might purchase a copy.[7] This indicates that the book was desirable to 18th-century collectors, particularly fine artists. Blake was one such artist-collector and was known to frequent London’s auction houses (such as Langford’s in Covent Garden) from his youth, searching for reproductions after ‘The great Italians, – Raffaelle, Michael Angelo, Giulio Romano’.[8] Blake’s lifelong preference for 16th-century Italian prints, particularly those of the Roman and Florentine schools, is well documented by his contemporaries, biographers, and by Blake himself.[9]

Unfortunately, Blake had to sell the majority of his personal print collection in 1821 because of declining financial circumstances.[10] This did not, however, seem to discourage his interest in reproductions of Italian Masters. For example, in 1823, a year before Blake began the Dante illustrations (and, probably, his study of Michelangelo’s Adam), he visited the British Museum prints and drawings room with John Linnell on two occasions.[11] There, they looked at prints by Marc Antionio Raimondi (1480–1534) and Giulio Bonasone (1510–1576), both 16th-century copyists of Michelangelo, seeking inspiration for the project Linnell had recently commissioned from Blake: the engraving of his 1806 watercolour illustrations of the Book of Job.[12] We also know that the young Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), who was taken by Linnell to meet Blake at his flat in 1824, looked at several Italian prints with Blake. In a letter to Alexander Gilchrist, Palmer recounts:

I can never forget the evening when Linnell took me to Blake’s house, nor how the quiet hours passed with him in the examination of antique gems, choice pictures, and Italian prints of the sixteenth century.[13]

Except for the adjective ‘Italian’, there is no explicit indication in Palmer’s description that the pictures they perused together were from Hamilton’s Picturae. But it is noteworthy that Blake’s drawing of Adam from Cunego’s engraving appears to date from the same year, 1823. While there is no record of Hamilton’s Picturae being in Blake’s possession, it certainly could have been. It is possible that Linnell or another of Blake’s artist friends might have brought him a copy. Blake might also have seen it at the British Museum, which was just a short walk north of his flat in the Strand. Regardless of the exact connection, his drawing of Adam is clearly sourced from Cunego’s print, allowing us the better to contextualize Blake as an artist within a visual culture dominated by Italian Renaissance motifs, yet who could only study these motifs remotely.

What of the style of Blake’s drawing? Blake’s Adam, like Cunego’s and Michelangelo’s, is blocky-limbed. He reclines on his right arm, with his left arm and eyes uplifted, awaiting the spark of creation. The main difference between the source and Blake’s study is that in Blake’s version there is no reciprocal hand in the top right: instead of meeting his Maker, Blake’s figure gazes laconically towards nothing. Butlin’s only comment on this is that Adam’s expression ‘bears a remarkable likeness to Blake himself’, and indeed, when comparing the face with Thomas Phillips’s 1807 portrait of Blake, there is an echo of the same proud, rounded chin, downturned nose, and slight hypertelorism of the eyes.[14] Most of all, though, it is likely the enigmatic, dreamy gaze which Adam casts out of the right side of the painting that reminds Butlin of Phillips’s portrait (Pl 6).

 

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6 William Blake by Thomas Phillips (1770–1845), 1807. Oil on canvas, 92.1 x 72 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London

 

When sitting for this portrait, Blake was reportedly recounting to Phillips his spiritual encounters with Michelangelo’s paintings.[15] The resemblance between his contemplative expression in the portrait and that in Blake’s drawing of Adam might, therefore, not be entirely coincidental.

 

  1. Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols, II, ‘Text’, New Haven and London 1981, p590. ↑
  2. John Flaxman, ‘26 April 1784’, in GE Bentley Jr, ed, Blake Records: Second Edition, New Haven and London 2004, p28. ↑
  3. Bernadine Barnes, Michelangelo in Print, Abingdon and New York 2016, p34. ↑
  4. Barnes, pp29–53. ↑
  5. R Marks, ‘Organs of Embodied Sentiment: William Blake’s Sistine Studies’, Cambridge Quarterly, vol 52, no. 3, 2023. ↑
  6.  David Irwin, ‘Gavin Hamilton: Archaeologist, Painter, and Dealer’, The Art Bulletin, vol 44, no. 2, 1962, pp87–102. ↑
  7. Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds presents his Compliments and begs to know if Mr West can inform him where Mr G Hamilton’s Prints are to be sold’, in FW Hilles, ed, Letters of Reynolds, Cambridge 1929, XXIV To Benjamin West, 1773, p38. ↑
  8. Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, W Graham Roberts, ed, New York 1998, p10 (first published London 1907). ↑
  9. See GE Bentley Jr, William Blake: The Critical Heritage, London 1975, pp3–6, 32–3, 37–8, 71, 157. ↑
  10. Robert N Essick, ‘Blake, William (1757–1827), engraver, artist, and poet’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2004, accessed 22 October 2023. ↑
  11. Alfred Thomas Story, The Life of John Linnell, London 1892, ch 12, quoting Linnell’s journal: ‘In 1823. In that year also – on April 4 and 24 – Linnell went “with Mr. Blake to British Museum to see prints”.’ ↑
  12. Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, p303: ‘[Linnell] called his attention to… Marc Antionio and the Italian’s contemporary and disciple Bonasoni.’ ↑
  13. Gilchrist, p318. ↑
  14. Butlin, Paintings and Drawings, p590. ↑
  15. Blake, anecdote from Alan Cunningham, The Cabinet Gallery of Pictures, London 1833, in GE Bentley Jr, Blake Records: Second Edition, New Haven and London 2004, p233: ‘I closed the book and cried, “Aye! Who can paint and angel?” A voice in the room answered, “Michael Angelo could”.’ ↑

 

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