Illustration to Edward Young's Night Thoughts, Page 15 - William Blake
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Description
A visionary engraving by William Blake from his 1797 series illustrating Edward Young's poem, Night Thoughts, depicting a bound figure reading.
This engraving originates from William Blake's ambitious project to illustrate Edward Young's poem, Night Thoughts, commissioned by the publisher Richard Edwards in 1795. Blake produced a series of 537 watercolour drawings for the text, of which only a small portion were eventually engraved and published in 1797. The composition features a recumbent male figure, bound by thorny vines and chains, who is absorbed in reading. A diminutive female figure sits upon his leg, creating a surreal juxtaposition of scale that is characteristic of Blake's visionary approach to narrative art.
The imagery reflects the melancholic and philosophical themes of Young's poetry, which explores mortality, grief, and the human condition. Blake does not merely decorate the page; he interprets the text through his own symbolic vocabulary. The thorny vines suggest the burdens of earthly existence, while the act of reading serves as a bridge between the physical world and the intellectual or spiritual realm. The engraving technique, executed by Blake himself, employs fine cross-hatching to create subtle gradations of tone, lending a soft, ethereal quality to the figures and the surrounding space. The text block is integrated into the design, allowing the visual elements to frame the printed verses. This work provides a window into the collaborative process between poet and artist during the late eighteenth century, demonstrating how Blake transformed a standard literary commission into a personal exploration of his own mythological and spiritual concerns. The print captures the tension between the weight of physical confinement and the liberation found within the pages of a book.
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Each print is produced to order using 12-colour giclée printing on FSC-certified archival paper. Designed in Britain and printed at your nearest production hub to reduce waste and speed up delivery.
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Museum-grade giclée on FSC-certified archival matte paper, with framed and canvas options.
- Paper sizes: A4, A3, A2, A1, A0 and B2 (50×70 cm)
- Canvas: XS (20×30 cm) to Large (60×90 cm)
- Frames: black, natural wood, dark wood or white
Illustration to Edward Young's Night Thoughts, Page 15 - William Blake
Artist Biography
William Blake
He married Catherine Boucher in 1782. She was illiterate at the time and signed the marriage register with an X. He taught her to read, write, and engrave, and she became his collaborator for the next forty-five years: mixing paint, operating the printing press, hand-colouring plates, and binding the finished pages into covers.
Their working method was Blake's own invention, revealed to him (he said) in a dream by the spirit of his dead brother Robert. Relief etching reversed the standard printmaking process: instead of cutting lines into copper, Blake wrote and drew on the plate in acid-resistant varnish, then dissolved the surrounding metal with acid, leaving text and image raised. This allowed him to compose poetry and illustration simultaneously on a single plate, print them together, then hand-colour each sheet in watercolour. Every copy was therefore unique. Songs of Innocence and of Experience was produced this way. He sold fewer than thirty copies during his lifetime.
In 1803, he physically threw a soldier named John Schofield out of his garden in Felpham. He was charged with assault and with uttering treasonable expressions against the King. He was acquitted at the Chichester assizes in January 1804.
Newton, painted in 1795, shows the scientist as a young man with the body of a Greek god, bent forward at the bottom of a dark ocean, fixing his gaze on a pair of compasses, measuring and drawing on a scroll that appears to project from his own head. It is a painting about the limits of reason: beautiful, precise, and missing everything beyond the edge of the paper. The Ancient of Days, from the same period, depicts his mythological figure Urizen crouching at the edge of a void, reaching down with a compass to measure the darkness below.
He died on 12 August 1827, working on illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. He was buried at Bunhill Fields. The wider recognition came decades later.
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