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William Blake’s Canterbury Pilgrims arrive in Special Collections
See larger image of William Blake’s Canterbury Pilgrims
The McCormick Library of Special Collections is excited to announce the recent acquisition of a copy of William Blake’s engraving, The Canterbury Pilgrims. This spectacular print depicts the frieze-like procession of Chaucer and his fellow travelers setting out just before dawn from the Tabarde Inn on the inaugural day of their journey. With print impression dimensions of almost exactly 3-foot-by-1-foot, this is the largest work Blake ever engraved after one of his own designs.
The first state of this print was published in 1810, but over the years Blake kept working on the plate, dramatically enriching its tonal and textural variety with additional hatching, crosshatching, and burnishing. Our print is a later re-strike from the last state of the plate, the fifth. Blake tended not to alter the engraved caption dates on his plates from those of the first printings, so though the text on our print reads “Painted in Fresco by William Blake & by him Engraved and Published October 8. 1810,” it is estimated that this fifth state was completed more than ten years later, sometime between 1820 and 1823. This later date makes stylistic sense. The superb light effects of the dawning sky, for example, bear a familial relation to the handling of light in such late masterpieces as his 1825 Illustrations to the Book of Job.
As his caption states, the print was based upon Blake’s painting The Canterbury Pilgrims, a work which was exhibited with other Blake paintings in 1809 at the home of Blake’s brother. The show was a flop, perhaps one of England’s greatest art exhibit disasters inverse to the retrospective celebrity of the artist. The famous Descriptive Catalogue Blake wrote about his exhibit is particularly detailed in its attention to the Canterbury painting, and as W. B. Yeats later wrote of the whole of the Descriptive Catalogue in his introduction to Poems of William Blake, Blake’s text is “full of magnificent and subtle irony and of violent and petulant anger.”
This angry energy had many sources, but one specific to The Canterbury Pilgrims is Blake’s belief that his idea for his design had been stolen by the collusion of two men: his (former) friend the artist Thomas Stothard, whose designs Blake had engraved as a young copy engraver, and his (former) publisher R. H. Cromek. Cromek had earlier commissioned Blake to design illustrations for an edition of Robert Blair’s poem The Grave and it was Blake’s understanding that he would also be performing the more lucrative task of engraving those designs. Cromek instead gave the job of engraving Blake’s designs to Luigi Schiavonetti, whose style was to Blake anathema. Adding fire to Blake’s anger at this perceived slight and betrayal, Cromek was to announce in printed editions of The Grave the publication of a print of The Canterbury Pilgrims designed by Stothard, the format of which is extraordinarily similar to Blake’s design: an extreme horizontal frieze-like procession of the Pilgrims on horseback. Blake believed the general idea for this design had been stolen from him. Later scholars have challenged this claim of priority, and in fact Stothard’s painting and the print based upon it both saw the public light of day prior to either Blake’s painting of the same subject or his print, though this does not completely disprove Blake’s assertion of intellectual theft.
Blake had some hopes that in his own very different style he might -- like the satirical caricaturists Hogarth and James Gillray -- find a way to support himself successfully by the sale of his prints, and The Canterbury Pilgrims was part of this campaign. This was not to be and in ironic contrast to the serenity of the fresh morning scene it depicts, with those joyful birds and scampering little hounds, The Canterbury Pilgrims is a laden token of Blake’s most difficult mid-life years, when profound frustration at the lack of worldly appreciation he received would prove most disheartening, and darken further, in a mind already so keen to hidden meanings, paranoid interpretations of the same.
It’s generally accepted that the figure of the Ploughman in this print (see image at left) is a self-portrait of Blake, and as has been widely pointed out, this might be read on one level to be a reference to Blake’s work as an engraver: one who ploughs lines into copperplate with a burin. The motif of ploughing also recurs in Blake’s poetry, as in such mottos from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as “Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead,” “The cut worm forgive the plough,” and “As the plough follows words, so God rewards prayers.”
It’s been pointed out by the scholar M. E. Reisner that at least two other of the figures in this print are likely portraits of real people: the prominent opposing politicians William Pitt and Charles Fox, Pitt figuring as the Pardoner, Fox as the Summoner. Both men were routinely depicted in satirical prints of the later 18th and early 19th century, most memorably by James Gillray, and the McCormick Library has a number of Gillray prints depicting both men which may be compared to Blake’s versions.
The long horizontal format of Blake’s print suggests that he may have envisioned it being marketable as a possible mantelpiece decoration. Blake himself seems to have kept a preliminary drawing of this design above a door in his own sitting room. Of this Blake’s biographer Alexander Gilchrist reports (in an amusing example of Blake’s mysticism, and what might also be considered his paranoia, and sweet charm) that having taken the drawing down for examination, Blake was surprised to find it “nearly effaced,” and is said to have exclaimed that this must have been the result of “some malignant spell.” To that exposition Blake’s friend the artist John Flaxman is said to have retorted “Why! my dear sir! As if, after having left a pencil drawing so long exposed to air and dust, you could have expected otherwise!”
Scott Krafft
McCormick Library of Special Collections