First there are the tempera pictures, or “frescoes,” as he termed them. He would never paint in oil-colour, because he thought and wrote that “oil, being a body itself, will drink, or absorb very little colour, and changing yellow, and at length brown, destroys every colour it is mixed with, especially every delicate colour. It turns every permanent white to a yellow or brown putty, and has compelled the use of that destroyer of colour, white lead, which when its protecting oil is evaporated will become lead again,” and he hotly affirmed the opinion that “oil became a fetter to genius and a dungeon to art.” This being so, he evolved a method of painting in water-colours, stiffened with white of egg or dilute glue, on a ground prepared with whiting or plaster and laid on copper or board.

When the “fresco” was finished he varnished it with a preparation of glue. In his old age Linnell lent him a copy of Cennino Cennini’s “Trattato della pittura,” and he was delighted to find that the method he had always employed in his tempera pictures was very like that of the old sixteenth-century painter.

Occasionally his pictures acquired the mellow harmony, the indescribable deep, yet faded tenderness of the old masters’ tempera pictures, as for instance that entitled “Bathsheba at the Bath seen by David.” There is nothing supernatural or weird here, save the flowers which grow around the pool, and they are like the strange mysterious blooms that appear to one in dreams. Bathsheba, nude and beautiful, with her two childish attendants, one on either side, somehow recalls the work of Masaccio and Filippino Lippi in the Chapel of the Carmine at Florence, perhaps because it is so nobly naturalistic in treatment.

Another beautiful tempera is “The Flight into Egypt.” It was painted in 1790—the year of the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Holman Hunt developed in his magnificent picture of the same subject a poetic motive first used by Blake. The great may take from the great without shame. The angelic spirits of the martyred Innocents flutter around the Mother and Child, while the ass on which they ride is followed by angels with great gloomy wings, like night made visible and beneficent. The Virgin’s little delicate face looks wistfully from the dim picture like one of Gentile da Fabbriano’s small jewel-clear miniatures, and a crescent moon shines vaguely silver through the darkness. This is a picture of high and tender imaginative quality, more in the spirit of old masters like Fra Angelico, it must be admitted, than characteristically Blakean in expression.

There are three other methods used by Blake, of which one—the printed or engraved outline, filled in with hand-wrought water-colour—is so familiar to us from the examples studied at the British Museum, that we need not linger to describe it again. At the British Museum we have also seen many of Blake’s “colour-printed” designs, but not any nearly as fine as the two pictures entitled “Hecate” and “Lamech and his two Wives” of the exhibition. The process, according to the younger Tatham’s account, was as follows: “Blake when he wanted to make his prints in oil, took a common thick millboard and drew, in some strong ink or colour, his designs upon it strong and thick. He then painted upon that in such oil colours and on such a state of fusion that they would blur well. He painted roughly and quickly, so that no colour would have time to dry. He then took a print of that on paper, and this impression he coloured up in water-colours, repainting his outline on the millboard when he wanted to take another impression; and each having a sort of accidental look, he could branch out so as to make each one different. The accidental look they had was very enticing.”

The depth and grandeur of tone obtained in “Hecate” are unique, and, united to the sombre majesty of the composition, form a most satisfying work to eye and intellect. Looking closely at the technique, the colour is seen to be collected in little pin-head dots all over the ground, in a manner that clearly points to its having been impressed while yet wet, with some carefully roughened surface, but just what means were used to obtain this effect must always remain a mystery.

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THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT

Tempera painting. Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. W. Graham Robertson