November 15, 2024
K-State English professor discovers William Blake's earliest engravings
Mark Crosby, associate professor in the department of English, has discovered previously unknown engravings by poet and artist William Blake on the reverse of a series of copper plates held by the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford.
According to a press release issued by the Bodleian, Crosby used ARCHiOx’s Selene Photometric Stereo System, which is able to scan the surface of objects at over one-million pixels per square inch, to highlight these engravings. Most marks suggest the technical exercises of an apprentice learning basic engraving techniques, but the new technology also revealed doodled details like an engraved miniature face impossible to view with the naked eye.
Materials from the Bodleian archives connect Blake, most famous for his Songs of Innocence and Experience, to the plates. Attributed to the studio of James Basire, they were part of a series produced during the 1770s, coinciding with William Blake’s apprenticeship with Basire. Furthermore, some of the newly discovered motifs recur in Blake’s later work, most significantly in two of his watercolor paintings of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Collectively, this evidence suggests that these engravings can be attributed to an apprentice at the studio of master engraver James Basire, who would most likely have been the young Blake. If it is indeed the work of William Blake, they reveal previously unknown insights into the artistic and technical development of the artist at the very outset of his career.
"These doodles reveal personal, intimate moments that were not intended to be seen by anyone other than the artist," Crosby said. "For the first time since they were made, we can now see the practice work and doodling of the young apprentice responsible for, amongst other things, the tiny visionary face that emerges from the copperplate to return our gaze across two and half centuries."
His research was covered by international news outlets including the BBC Today Programme, The Times, and The Smithsonian. Referred articles will appear in Print Quarterly and Blake Illustrated Quarterly.
On Dec. 2, Crosby will discuss how cutting-edge 3D recording technology made this discovery possible at free public panel "Seeing the Unseen in Oxford University Collections" being held in person at the Weston Library.