Weeping Person at Grave - William Blake
Archival giclée
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Description
A poignant engraving by William Blake from his illustrations for Edward Young's Night Thoughts, depicting a mourner comforted by a descending spirit.
This engraving is a plate from William Blake's ambitious project to illustrate Edward Young's poem, Night Thoughts. Blake produced these designs between 1795 and 1797, creating a series of watercolours that were subsequently engraved for a planned publication. The image depicts a figure in a posture of profound sorrow, hunched over near a brick structure that suggests a tomb or memorial. Above, a spectral or angelic form descends, pointing upward with a single finger, creating a visual dialogue between earthly grief and spiritual transcendence.
Blake's approach to the text is not merely decorative. He engages with the themes of mortality and the afterlife present in Young's verse. The composition balances the heavy, textured masonry of the tomb with the ethereal, light-filled quality of the descending figure. The lines are precise and controlled, characteristic of the engraving techniques employed during the late eighteenth century. The contrast between the solid, grounded figure of the mourner and the elongated, weightless form of the spirit creates a tension that reflects the poem's preoccupation with the transition from life to death.
As a visionary artist and poet, Blake often sought to interpret literary works through his own mythological lens. In this instance, the physical act of weeping is juxtaposed with the promise of an aerial or divine perspective. The inclusion of the printed text within the plate demonstrates the integration of word and image, a hallmark of Blake's practice. This print offers a glimpse into the collaborative yet highly individualistic nature of Blake's work for commercial publishers, where his unique aesthetic sensibilities often transformed standard literary commissions into personal explorations of the human condition.
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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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- Museum-grade giclée printing for rich, fade-resistant colour
- Archival matte fine-art paper, FSC-certified
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- Frames in black, natural wood, dark wood or white
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- Dust gently with a soft, dry cloth
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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
Weeping Person at Grave - 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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