William Blake And His Three Patrons

William Blake is an complex artist-as a painter, a poet and an engraver. Blake lived in the prime of Enlightment Age yet created the most intense Romantic art, which is a marvelous blend of mystical imagination,religious symbolism and violent liberalism. Living in the18th century and19th century London, Blake faced the flourishing English art market marked by great fortune and competition. Blake was desperate to succeed as an artist but find himself incapable of succumbing to the current fad. Blake lived in uncharted obscurity for most of his lifetime, engraving for other’s works and meanwhile invented a printing technique to combine both words and images for his original works, which he called "illuminated printing". Blake’s engraving works were turned down quite often because of his queer and uncompromising style. With measly engraving commissions, Blake was fortunate to have a few supporting patrons who enabled him to work with relative freedom, namely Thomas Butts, William Hayley, and John Linnel. These three patrons had influenced the artist in different stages of both his engraving and art work. Social studies on William Blake’s art were relatively scarce, this thesis attempted to track the artistic course by examining the relationship between Blake and his patrons and their influence on the artist.The first chapter outlined the life and work throughout Blake’s whole life, as well as the milieu of his age, including the art market and patronage system in England. The second chapter exams Blake’s identity as both an commercial engraver and artist. The third chapter and the forth chapter explores the three patrons in both Blake’s middle age and old age by looking into the relationship between Blake and his patrons and their commissions, thus to determine their influence on the artist.