Poems of Thomas Gray

With watercolour illustrations by William Blake

A remarkable work from a visionary artist - Limited to 1,000 copies

Varied in style and boldly imaginative, the illustrations were commissioned around 1797 by Blake’s friend, the neoclassical sculptor John Flaxman, as a gift for his wife, Ann. After Flaxman’s death in 1826, the watercolours were sold at Christie’s and soon came into the possession of the eccentric millionaire William Beckford, who left his library to his daughter, wife of the 10th Duke of Hamilton. But, when the library was sold at Sotheby’s in 1882, the Gray illustrations were missing. It was not until 1919 that the scholar and literary critic Professor Herbert Grierson announced their discovery during the demolition of Hamilton Palace in Scotland. In a letter to The Times, he declared: ‘I have seen no collection which illustrates so fully the range of Blake’s power.’ This new Folio Society facsimile captures the breadth and beauty of this enthralling work, and is accompanied by a commentary volume containing the most authoritative analysis of the illustrations.

While Blake’s watercolours for Gray’s poems share iconographic and stylistic elements with those for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts – both owe much to the imagery he created in his earlier illuminated books – they are remarkable for their diversity of mood and colour, and for their sophisticated interpretation of the poems. This range mirrors the diversity of the poems themselves – epics, satires, odes and, most famously, the ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard’. Some prompted Blake to displays of playful humour; some fuelled dramatic, fearful images; others inspired delicate, tranquil scenes. The illustrations to ‘The Descent of Odin’, which tells of the god’s encounter with a prophetess in the underworld, are almost in monochrome, save for the scant use of a vivid red. Many of them are highly economical; all are arresting in their depiction of the great, armour-clad god. For ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’, Blake begins with a sequence of languid, softly coloured scenes. But when the poet speaks of the ‘doom’ that awaits heedless youth, Blake responds with images at once captivating and ghastly, depicting the harbingers of sorrow and death as they descend from lurid skies or lurk in ‘the vale of years beneath’. In all of them, Blake responds to Gray’s themes with dazzling energy and imagination, distilling them through his own visions – sometimes obliquely, sometimes overtly. One design for ‘The Bard’ is a brilliant example of what Blake described as his ‘double vision’ – his ability to detect visionary truths in the natural world. In this illustration, the ‘giant-oak’, ‘the desert-cave’ and ‘the torrent’ are depicted as formidable human figures intertwined with natural forms.

Blake’s artistic method was similar to that employed for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, which he had completed in 1796. He cut windows in large sheets of paper and mounted in these spaces the texts of the poems, taken from a 1790 octavo edition. The off-centre position of the text on each page follows the conventions of book design: this shows us that Blake intended the work to be an illustrated book, rather than a series of unbound designs.On each page, he marked with a pencilled cross the couplet that he had chosen to visualise.

Rather than seeing the pages of text as obstructive or restrictive, Blake worked with them, often using them to support or add a further dimension to his designs. On the title page for ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’, Selima the cat crouches atop the text page and reaches for her prey; in ‘Ode on the Spring’, angelic figures dart around it.

Blake saw illustration not as a direct visual accompaniment, but as a process of interpretation through which ideas could collide, fuse, shift and develop. In his foreword Martin Butlin describes this as ‘the dramatic confrontation of two images of the truth’. It was through his illustrations that Blake contested ideas that he found insubstantial or insidious, celebrated those he endorsed and expressed his own distinct notions of spirituality. The 116 watercolours to Gray’s poems are a rich example of this unusual and highly effective method of interpretation.

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Selima now has the head, shoulders and forepaws of a cat – but she is draped from the waist down with clothes that reveal beneath them human feet, ready in Gray’s phrasing to be ‘beguil’d’. Hovering close, and drawn with an elaborate seriousness that echoes Gray’s mock-epic tone, sits Fate, scissors in hand, preparing to slit the thick-spun thread of Selima’s life. In the water below we see the Genii, their forms still much as they were in the preceding illustration but displaying in flight more of their finny wings, which are now a more vivid orange in colour.

The Descent of Odin This poem tells the story of the descent of the god Odin to ‘Hela’s drear abode’, which Gray identifies in a note as ‘the hell of the Gothic nations’. At the ‘eastern gate’ he stops and pronounces a ‘Runic rhyme’ to summon ‘the prophetic Maid’, whose identity the poem never makes very clear. Odin’s questions and the prophetess’s unwilling responses make up the remainder of the poem: Odin’s son Balder shall die at his brother’s hand, we learn, and another brother, a ‘wondrous boy’ yet unborn, will avenge him. In the last lines the prophetess recognises her questioner, who until now has called himself simply ‘A Traveller to thee unknown’, and refuses to answer further.

• • Quarter leather binding with cloth sides.
• • Printed and blocked with a design from ‘Ode to Music’, redrawn by David Eccles.
• • Endpapers of Curious Metallics gold leaf and Marcate Nettuno Carruba.
• • Printed on Modigliani Insize Candido paper.
• • 120 pages.
• • Book size: 17" x 13".

• • Commentary volume bound in cloth.
• • Set in Miller Display.
• • 224 pages plus a frontispiece portrait of Blake by John Flaxman.
• • Book size: 9½" x 6".




Both volumes are presented in a buckram-bound solander box

Dear Reader

The Tate Gallery has long championed the work of William Blake, helping to cement his reputation as one of the most imaginative and inventive of all British artists. It was home to the first ever Blake Gallery in the 1920s, and in 2009 recreated Blake’s legendary 1809 exhibition of his own work. But it was another, remarkable, exhibition that introduced me to what is for me the most fascinating of all Blake’s creations.

In 1978, the Tate presented Poems by Thomas Gray with Watercolour Illustrations by William Blake. Alongside each unbound page was the corresponding page from the only existing facsimile of the work at the time – the three-volume edition produced by the Trianon Press in 1972 for the William Blake Trust. Viewing each page, I was amazed by the depth and variety of Blake’s response. I was familiar with some of Gray’s poems, but the illustrations – while remaining faithful to the texts – brought from them fantastic, vivid images and an epic, even cosmic scale. What’s more, his method was unlike anything I had ever seen. Rather than alternating the poems with illustrations, Blake set each page of verse within the image that it inspired. Verse and image are made integral to each other, both in what they convey and in their physical interaction on the page. Blake was the first and last artist to work in this way, which is hardly surprising: what to most artists would be an intolerable compositional constraint became for Blake a source of creative inspiration. To see such creativity at first hand was immensely inspiring.

I was also struck by the astonishing fidelity of the Trianon facsimile. In fact, it was so superbly produced that it was barely possible to distinguish the facsimile pages from the original ones. It was hailed as a masterpiece of facsimile publishing: the Times Literary Supplement stated that ‘nothing like these books has ever been printed before and it is highly unlikely that they could ever be printed again’.

But sometimes the highly unlikely comes to pass. Back in 1978 I was just embarking on my publishing career; thirty-odd years and innumerable editions later, Blake’s illustrations remained vivid in my mind. That Trianon facsimile had become very scarce and expensive, and it seemed a good time to produce a new facsimile and enable another generation to appreciate this great work.

The original watercolours are now housed in the Yale Center for British Art, founded by the collector Paul Mellon. I was delighted to find our proposal warmly received by the Center’s curators and made several visits there during the production of the facsimile. Back in England, we were able to fine-tune our proofs against a copy of the Trianon Press edition held in the British Library, before carrying out a final check against the originals. It was Blake’s patron John Flaxman who predicted that Blake’s finest pictures ‘would be as much sought after and treasured as those of Michelangelo now’. Blake’s watercolours for the Poems of Thomas Gray are undoubtedly among his masterpieces, and we hope that with this facsimile, we have succeeded in capturing their beauty and originality.

Yours sincerely

Joe Whitlock Blundell
Production Director

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