1757-1827 British William Blake Galleries William Blake started writing poems as a boy, many of them inspired by religious visions. Apprenticed to an engraver as a young man, Blake learned skills that allowed him to put his poems and drawings together on etchings, and he began to publish his own work. Throughout his life he survived on small commissions, never gaining much attention from the London art world. His paintings were rejected by the public (he was called a lunatic for his imaginative work), but he had a profound influence on Romanticism as a literary movement.
Los Entering the Grave
1804-20 Etching with pen, watercolour and gold, 220 x 160 mm Yale Center for British Art, New Haven This is the frontispiece of the illustrated poem Jerusalem. In the coloured version of the frontispiece to his Jerusalem, Blake placed the thorns of the Passion beneath his own personification, Los, as he steps bravely through a door into a dark, grave-like void. This is not an end but the beginning: Los has embarked on an adventure, one hand raised in greeting and the other holding a blazing sun to illuminate the truths to be revealed in the following pages. Author: BLAKE, William Title: Los Entering the Grave Form: graphics , 1751-1800 , English , mythological