Milton lovd me in childhood & shewd me his face.Īnd how beautifully Blake reciprocated that love - however one may feel about religion, there is something undeniably and immeasurably powerful about Blake’s paintings, an ineffable magic that sparks its very own source of divinity: ‘Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels’ (Butts set) ‘Satan, Sin, and Death: Satan Comes to the Gates of Hell’ (Thomas set) ‘The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden’ (Butts set) ‘The Rout of the Rebel Angels’ (Thomas set) ‘Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve’ (Linnell set) ‘Adam and Eve Asleep’ (Butts set) ‘Satan Spying on Adam and Eve’s Descent into Paradise’ (Thomas set) ‘Raphael Warns Adam and Eve’ (Thomas set) ‘The Temptation and Fall of Eve’ (Butts set) In a letter to his friend John Flaxman from September of 1800, Blake wrote: The first two sets contained twelve paintings each the Linnell set was incomplete, with only three finished works surviving to this day.Įven though Blake created all of the Paradise Lost paintings late in life, Milton was his greatest influence and the writer whose work he illustrated more than any other. Blake created three different sets of artwork for the Milton classic - one in 1807, at the age of 50, under a commission by the Reverend Joseph Thomas one in 1808, commissioned by Blake’s patron Thomas Butts and one in 1822, commissioned by John Linnell, the same patron who facilitated Blake’s stunning illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. But among the most breathtakingly beautiful are William Blake‘s illustrations for John Milton’s Paradise Lost ( public library). There is a rare confluence of joys about celebrated artists’ illustrations for literary classics, from Picasso’s 1934 drawings for a naughty ancient Greek comedy to Matisse’s 1935 etchings for Ulysses to Salvador Dalí’s prolific illustrations for Don Quixote in 1946, the essays of Montaigne in 1947, Alice in Wonderland in 1969, and Romeo & Juliet in 1975.
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