The Pastorals of Virgil, Eclogue I: The Shepherd Chases away a Wolf - William Blake
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Description
A wood engraving by William Blake from his 1821 series illustrating The Pastorals of Virgil, capturing a dramatic pastoral scene of a shepherd protecting his flock.
This wood engraving is one of the seventeen illustrations William Blake produced for Robert John Thornton's edition of The Pastorals of Virgil, published in 1821. It represents a rare foray into wood engraving for the artist, who typically favoured copperplate etching and engraving for his own visionary books. Despite the technical constraints of the medium, Blake achieved a remarkable degree of tonal variation and atmospheric depth within a small format.
The scene depicts a shepherd in a moment of urgent action, raising a staff to drive a wolf away from his flock. The composition is dense, with the shepherd positioned centrally against a backdrop of rolling hills and a rustic enclosure. Blake employs a series of short, rhythmic marks to define the textures of the foliage, the sheep, and the rugged terrain. The contrast between the dark, hatched areas and the lighter, un-inked paper creates a sense of movement and tension typical of his late work.
These illustrations were highly regarded by a younger generation of artists, including Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert, who formed the group known as the Ancients. They admired the raw, expressive quality of Blake's woodcuts, which departed from the polished, academic style prevalent in commercial book illustration at the time. The work captures a sense of pastoral drama, focusing on the vulnerability of the flock and the protective role of the shepherd. It remains a significant example of Blake's ability to imbue small-scale commercial commissions with his own distinct imaginative power and technical innovation.
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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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Specific Features
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Materials & Sizing
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
The Pastorals of Virgil, Eclogue I: The Shepherd Chases away a Wolf - 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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