Physical beauty, splendour of colour, only thrilled and arrested him when he recognized in them the symbols of an idea, when they seemed to hint of things rarer and more excellent than any purely natural or intrinsic attribute. If he could discriminate its eternal inner message, and could make it visible to the world, then was physical beauty worthy of reproduction. But he seldom dwelt on beauty for its own sake, but only when it was spiritually significant; so it is easy to see why he was inaccessible to the influence of such artists as Rubens and Le Brun.
At the Academy Schools he had the opportunity of drawing from the living model, and profited by it to a certain limited extent. But he always had an aversion to it, declaring that to his whimsical nature it “smelt of mortality.” However he might and did justify his negligence of this important branch of technique, his art was necessarily weakened by it. Technique is the language of art, and is only to be obtained by frequent and laboriously faithful reference to nature. It is true that Blake’s strong power of generalizing, along with his marvellous gift of recalling at desire things discriminated by him, made the achievement of technique through methods of life study a less urgent necessity to him than to other men who had no such retentive artistic memories. Essential lines Blake never failed to give, but by intention rather than from any inability he seldom gives more than these essential lines in the figures he drew and painted.
After all it is possible that his power of delineating swift movement, and the great range of emotions that correspond to that, might have been injured or lost by too close an application to the artificially posed human figure. We have seen much life lost in the too close study of life, as in the otherwise exquisite work of Lord Leighton.
Blake believed that to draw from the typical forms seen by him in vision was his true purpose and aim, and the study of individual human forms filled his eye with confusion, for, as he was for ever asserting, Nature seemed to him but a faint and garbled version of the grand originals seen in imagination, that is, in truth.
While Blake was educating himself in art, he had to earn his livelihood by engraver’s work, and between 1779 and 1782 one or two booksellers employed him to engrave designs after various artists. Among these artists was Stothard, to whom, in 1782, Blake was introduced. Stothard brought Flaxman and Blake together, and the three became warm friends. It was only after many years, and then through the machinations of an evil man (the publisher Cromek), that Blake became estranged from Stothard, and partially also from Flaxman.
In 1780 Blake exhibited his first picture in the Academy, “The Death of Earl Godwin.” It was only the twelfth exhibition of the institution, and the first to be held at Somerset House. How curiously do its four hundred and eighty-seven exhibits (including wax work and a design for a fan) contrast with our mammoth Academies of to-day! Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mary Moser, Gainsborough, Angelica Kauffman, Cosway and Fuseli, were all contributors in the year of grace 1780. Blake was in sympathy with none of them save Fuseli, who, although a man greatly overrated in his day, had a real sense of the potency of the invisible world, mainly, however, of that portion of it concerned with arch-fiends, witches, demons, and baleful omens.
In 1782 Blake married Catherine Bouchier, and set up housekeeping in Green Street. It appears that he had been much in love with a girl called Pollie Wood, who had jilted him. Going to stay at Richmond in a state of deep depression, he made the acquaintance of Catherine Bouchier. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have added this detail to the first biographer’s story. When she first entered the room where he sat, she was overcome by such intense emotion that she had to withdraw for awhile. She afterwards admitted that at that moment she became suddenly aware that she was in the presence of her future husband.
Small wonder that Blake felt an irresistible affinity for this charming dark-eyed girl whose fervent susceptible spirit responded so mysteriously to his own. No marriage was ever more happy. Catherine was of humble origin, and practically no education, for at the time of her marriage she was unable to read or write, but nevertheless she possessed the rare and delicate qualities necessary for the mate of a man like Blake. She early realized that the man she had married was no ordinary one, and to be of service to her dear “Mr. Blake” (as she always called him with quaint reverence), to enter into his thoughts, to smooth the path of his material life, and to conform her young and unlessoned girlhood to his difficult standard of plain living and high thinking, became her one absorbing object.
There were a few rough passages in the early days of married life, which Gilchrist indicates, but they soon disappeared. It was merely the friction and heat given off, before the two strong natures were fused into a perfect union. Catherine’s nature appears to have been a compound of ardent worship and pregnant sympathy. Never did a woman so forget herself in reverencing, nigh worshipping, the man she had chosen to marry.
During an unusually long, and in many respects a peculiarly isolated life, these two lived together, the one master mind and purpose informing both.