Robert N. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue

(Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. xxvii + 302, 123 illus. (9 color). *

Joseph Viscomi

The Separate Plates is a catalogue raisonne of prints William Blake produced as autonomous works of art. It excludes prints in books, such as illuminated prints and the Night Through designs, and in series, such as The Book of Job and the Dante prints. The plates it does treat are reproductive, original, and collaborative, executed in conventional and experimental techniques, and nearly all very rare. Some, like Deaths Door (XIII), exist in unique impressions, or like Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion (I), in unique first states. Even commercial plates, like The Idle Laundress (XXX) after George Morland, which his biographer said sold very well (p. 164), exists in only twelve impressions. The plates fall into seven categories, or parts. Part I consists of twenty-one plates invented and executed by Blake; Part II consists of twenty-two plates executed by Blake after designs by other artists; Part III consists of four plates executed by Blake and Thomas Butts Jr. and/or Senior; Part IV consists of two plates designed by Blake but never executed; Part V consists of eight book illustrations known only through separate impressions. In addition to these fifty-seven designs, the catalogue's primary focus, are Parts VI and VII, which treat six book illustrations also issued as separate prints, and twelve lost, conjectural, and misattributed plates.

All extant states of all plates described in the first five parts that show any changes in the image (except the second state of Chaucers Canterbury Pilgrims (XVI), both impressions of which are in private collections) are reproduced, as are all known preliminary drawings (except those in the easily accessible Notebook). Color printed impressions of The Accusers of Theft Adultery Murder (VIII), A Dream of Thiralatha (IX), and Joseph of Arimathea Preaching to the inhabitants of Britain (XI) are reproduced in color, which reveals that they were pulled sequentially. The quality of both color and monochrome reproduction is excellent, as is the book's design, with footnotes in wide margins and which in size (8.5 x 11 inches) matches Essick's superb William Blake, Printmaker (1980, also Princeton Univ. Press). It's worth stressing that Essick writes as well here as in the earlier study (no easy feat for technical material) and for the Blake scholar, not the collector, whom he correctly assumes to be unfamiliar with this kind of study. The introduction, for example, though brief, is an exceedingly clear and informative overview of Blake's technical experiments and development as a printmaker.

Separate Plates is not the first catalogue raisonne of these particular kinds of prints, but it is far more extensive, informative, and insightful than any attempted before. The first, an incomplete list compiled by William Michael Rossetti, was published as an appendix to Alexander Gilchrist's Life of Blake (1863 and 1880). This was followed by Archibald G. B. Russell's still useful The Engravings of William Blake (1912), which was replaced in 1956 by what became the standard work on the subject, Geoffrey Keynes' Engravings by William Blake: The Separate Plates. Essick treats this scholarly context fairly and instructively in the Preface, and argues persuasively the need for a new catalogue as opposed to a supplement or revision of Keynes. Since 1956 much new information has come to light about provenances, unrecorded impressions and states, technique, and, most important, dates of initial and subsequent execution of designs. Essick is himself responsible for a good deal of this new information, which has appeared in numerous articles but most systematically in Printmaker, where the analyses of techniques and their development are the grounds for the dating and redating here. In short, Separate Plates is a completely new catalogue, based on solid technical analyses and a thorough examination of original impressions and all "relevant primary documents" (p. xviii).

The plates within each part are arranged chronologically and within each entry by first state, with impressions of each state listed alphabetically by owner's name. The Pierpont Morgan Library copy of Joseph of Arimathea (I), for example, is copy 2G, which refers to the second state and seventh of eleven known impressions. The location, prove\nance, exhibition history, literature, appearance, and condition of all extant impressions are described in detail.[1] Untraced impressions, based on sales catalogues, are also listed, though their existence is more speculative and could duplicate known impressions. The commentary per plate, some of which is borrowed verbatim from Printmaker, is ample and penetrating, particularly so for Chaucers Canterbury Tales (XVI), Mirth (XVIII), Laocooen (XIX), A Man Sweeping the Interpreter's Parlour (XX), and The Ancient of Days (LXVII). Its dating of plates and states (impressions taken at different stages in the plate's development) is based on a thorough understanding of medium, technique, and iconography, the relation of preliminary drawings to the development of the plate, and Blake's continued development as a printmaker. The difference between two states may represent the work of a few days or many years, revealing either the initial creative process or the thinking and style of the period in which the changes were made. Consequently, defining states and fixing their dates (or perimeters) are two of the catalogue's primary objectives and, as noted below, its major successes and contributions to Blake scholarship, for they enable us not only to picture Blake's creative process but also the relation between creativity or invention and the materiality of execution.

In addition to including more technical and historical detail than any previous catalogue, it also includes more plates. The prints of Parts III-VI have not been previously catalogued or described in any detail. Like previous catalogues, however, Separate Plates excludes Blake's twelve large color monotypes (aka "color print drawings") of 1795. This is in part because Butlin treats them in The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), but also because they are supposedly closer to drawing and painting than to printmaker. By this logic, however, the validity of the illuminated prints as prints is negated, since they too were executed with tools (pens and brushes) and materials (a liquid medium) and in processes (writing, drawing, and coloring or dabbing color a la poupee) that are closer to drawing and painting than to cutting into or scratching across the surface of a metal plate. And like the large monotypes, illuminated prints are not exactly repeatable--though, in both cases, this has less to do with intention than with the exigencies of the mode of production, such as hand inking plates in small editions and coloring impressions. The difference lies in the illuminated print having its image fixed as it is drawn on the plate, while the monotype's image remained unfixed, present only as it was drawn and painted on a flat support and transferred to paper only while wet.

Or so it seemed. It was recently discovered that the support used for God Judging Adam was not an unmarked copperplate or millboard, as had long been assumed, but a relief plate, and thus its three impressions were created in the same relief etching technique as Joseph of Arimathea Preaching to the Inhabitants of Britain (XI) and A Dream of Thiralatha (IX) (Essick, "A Supplement to The Separate Plates," Blake Quarterly, 68 (1984), 139). This design Essick now defines as a separate plate, but not the other eleven, since they are still thought to have been printed from unmarked plates or millboards, either to save labor or money ("Supplement," p 139).[2] Millboard, though, does not necessarily mean the image was unfixed, since its outline could have been drawn and then varnished over. Applying ink or colors to the plate to print/transfer such an image would be comparable to color printing an intaglio plate like The Accusers of Theft Adultery Murder (VIII), where the outline lies below the surface and does not itself print. But even if the printed image was unstable and not exactly repeatable, the monotypes ought to be classified as prints by nature of the image having been transferred from one support to another. Essentially, the technique is to painting what illuminated printing is to drawing, both appropriate tools, materials, and processes from the paradigmatic media.

In this light, "Blake's use of relief techniques to create images that clearly proclaim themselves as inheritors of the great tradition of Western figurative art" did not necessarily "violate" the "basic principle of graphic decorum," which demanded that grand and serious subjects be rendered in sophisticated techniques and high finish (p. xxiv). Certainly, as Essick notes, relief etchings were "antithetical in mode of production and taste" to the "fashionably smooth stipple plates," but while the subjects were overtly in the "great tradition of Western figurative art," that tradition was known and admired not only through poetical and historical paintings, but also through old master drawings and the facsimiles of them, facsimiles like those of Ryland and Basire, Blake's teacher, in Charles Rogers's two volume Imitations of Old Master Drawings (1778), or Bartolozzi's and Richard Earlom's numerous prints in imitation of Cipriani and Guercino. Figurative, in other words, did not necessarily connote high finish so much as it did autographic gesture, expressed in an economy of line that connoisseurs had long defined as the sign of a master. In this sense, illuminated prints, like stipples, aquatints, and other facsimile processes, reflect the late eighteenth-century value on the artist's original and inspired first thoughts. [3]

In an effusive letter to Hayley, Blake equates the physical act of making art with "following [Christ's] cross," which one must take "up daily, Persisting in Spiritual Labours & the Use of that Talent which it is Death to Bury . . . (Complete Writings, ed. Keynes, p. 863). This affirmation of the regenerative powers of artistic labor was expressed when Milton was in progress and the commission to engrave his designs for Blair's The Grave apparently secured. Blake "felt Happy, as I used to be," but knew that his good fortune (and mental state) could change, that he could not depend on the publishers for the work he found spiritually necessary. For, as he acknowledged in the same letter, ". . . my Fate has been so uncommon that I expect Nothing. I was alive & in health & with the same Talents I now have all the time of Boydell's, Macklin's, Bowyer's, & other Great Works. I was known by them & was look'd upon by them as Incapable of Employment in those Works; it may turn out so again, notwithstanding appearances" (Keynes, p. 862).

The number of separate plates Blake produced for himself and others--even with the monotypes included--is very small, and that in itself is significant. Blake's twenty-two separate commercial plates, a few of which he published himself, were executed over a forty-two year period (1782-1824), which clearly validates Blake's belief that he had been ignored by the print publishers (as opposed to the book publishers, for whom he executed hundreds of plates). Separate plate reproductions had become big business, as the thousands of prints listed in the catalogues of Robert Bowyer, Thomas Macklin, Josiah Boydell, and Carrington Bowles attest. Bartolozzi produced 156 prints after Guercino's drawings alone, which Boydell in 1787 sold separately for a few shillings, or in two volumes in sheets for #10.10.0, the same price for Earlom's 200 prints (in sheets) after Claude's drawings in the Liber Veritatis. By 1785, Joseph Strutt, a stipple engraver and author of A Biographical Dictionary: ... an Historical Account of all Engravers, could boast that "the Art of Engraving was never more encouraged than in the present day, especially in England, where almost every man of taste is in some degree a collector of prints" (I, v). In 1800, Blake had also noted the increase in production and changed attitudes about collecting prints, what had once seemed like a "kind of criminal dissipation" become "Law and Gospel" (Poetry and Prose, ed. Erdman, p. 679). But the kinds of prints collected were primarily those "adapted to form and enrich the cabinets and Collections of the Curious; or, when framed and glazed, [to] make elegant and fashionable furniture" (Carrington Bowles, New and Enlarged Catalogue [1786], p. 43). These "fancy" or "furniture pieces," like Blake's Morning Amusement (XXII) and its companion, Evening Amusement (XXIII), both after Watteau (or modified copies after Watteaus's originals, since the paintings Keynes believed were the models Essick shows were in France at the time; p. 129), and Robin Hood & Clorinda (XXIV) after Meheux and The Fall of Rosamond (XXV) after Stothard, all four of which Blake produced for Macklin in 1782-83, were usually executed in stipple, combined with short lines and flick work.

This last plate, 15 1/2 x 13 1/4 inches with a circular image, netted Blake #80--and probably lost money for Macklin. It sold for 7s. 6d. plain and 15s. in colors, yet only six impressions in two states are extant. In 1800, eighty-seven plain impression and sixty-four in colors were auctioned as part of Macklin's estate. In other words, eighteen years after the plate was executed and Blake was paid, Macklin was still waiting to make back his investment, which in addition to the monies paid the engraver included sums for materials, for the printer and watercolorists. The auction impressions are now untraced, but they give us an idea of how risky (and competitive) the business of printselling was, despite the enormous popularity of prints, and why Boydell, who paid #250 to #400 for the engravings in the Shakespeare Gallery and a few hundred pounds for the paintings, went bankrupt. Blake, though, must have assumed business was booming to be paid #80 for one relatively small and technically easy plate. The next year he became a print publisher. With his partner, James Parker, another former apprentice of Basire's, he pulished two companion prints, Zephyrus and Flora (XVI) and Calisto (XVII), both after Stothard, both small ovals, and both in stipple. There are six impressions in two states of each plate, but a few more in colors may have been sold with the collection of Parker at auction in 1807 (p. 141). Even with no money spent on labor, and little on materials and presumably his friend's designs, they appear to have fared no better than Macklin. These are the only known publications of a partnership that "ended for unknown--but probably economic as well as personal--reasons" (p. xxiii).

Blake's and Parker's subjects and technique were calculated to satisfy the taste for stipples, a technique which forms the image by dots and which had become the "mania of the public" (John Landseer, Lectures on the Art of Engraving [1807], p. 241). It was used to imitate the granular effects of chalk drawings, as evinced by Blake's Mrs. Q (XLII), Mirth (XVIII), and fine portrait of Cowper after Lawrence in Hayley's Life ... of Cowper (1803-04). More ubiquitously (and insidiously according to some line engravers), it was also used to make over the original, regardless of its medium, in the characteristic soft tonal qualities of chalk and crayon. In a sense, stipple engraving realized more fully the purpose and value of print than line engraving. According to Thomas, Macklin (and most other connoisseurs and historians of engraving), "what Printing has been to Science, Engraving has been to the Arts." Engraving "has diffused what would have been local, and preserved what would have been lost. By the aid of this invention the works of the great Masters, who appeared since the restoration of Painting, are as accurately distinguished as those of the great authors of that period.... In either case it is mind operating upon mind; and the only difference is in the medium employed" (Poetic Description of Choice and Valuable Prints [1794], p. iii). The question is: Whose mind is operating, the printmaker's or the artist's?

Macklin, like the public at large and the Royal Academy, which refused printmakers full membership, perceived printmaking as "a secondary art. The design of the Painter must precede the labour of the Engraver" (Macklin, p. v). Precede literally, as in being the latter's model and reason d'etre, and precede in the sense of being primary. With prints secondary and subservient by definition, the question of whose mind is operating becomes problematic. If the painter's, then the graphic medium is not only secondary but transparent and transcendent as well, referring like type not to itself but to the model. Stipple, along with other tonal and facsimile processes, is better at this than line engraving. By imitating the marks and texture, and often the color and size, of the original drawings, or making the original painting over as a drawing, stipple appropriates the appearance of original art and shares in its value. Stipple engravings reveal the popularity of drawings as well as the printmaker's internalization of the bias against prints. By becoming transparent and adapting the code of the original, it appears to close the distance between original and echo, between primary and secondary artifact. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Blake himself spoke knowingly of Raphael despite never having seen an original painting; he "confused" copy (or facsimiles of the drawings) for the original. [4] And he reproduced the feel of original lines and medium when the job called for it, as in Timon and Alcibiades (XXXIII) and Falsa ad Coelum (XXXIV), where the needle imitates Fuseli's flashy pen style.

Compared to stipple, line engraving was far less transparent. According to the engraver Landseer it was a creative art form precisely because its code was different from the model's, a difference that defined engraving as an art of translation (Landseer, p. 178). By calling attention to itself, line engraving expressed the creative virtuosity of the engraver as well as the original ideas of the painter. The "mind operating on mind" was both printmaker's and painter's, effecting a kind of a dual consciousness in the viewer who is aware that a present moment pictures an image and moment from the past. As a style, line engraving conferred dignity to subjects; as a medium, it basked in the reflected glory of its more noble (poetical and historical) subjects and of a labor-intensive language analogous to highly finished paintings, a language expressive of the last, most reasonable thoughts of the painter, rather than of the unfinished sketch or materially insubstantial drawing that stipple imitated or reproduced. For Landseer and many other line engravers, line was privileged over stipple's dots (and aquatint's blots of blocked out tonal areas) because it represented a mode of production far more skillful and demanding physically and mentally, and because line represented strength, whereas dots and blots represented a "a soft blending & infantile indefinity," fuzzy thinking, even the feminization of reality (Landseer, p. 126).

Yet, in very different ways, engravers in tonal methods and in line sought the same objective: to overcome the secondary status of prints. [5] Neither, however, resorted to using original images, and thus both upheld the traditional division of labor between printmaker and artist. Blake's Edward and Elenor (IV) and Job (V), both 1793, represent another, more direct attempt to imbue value to prints. They are original works of art, invented and executed by the same person. In such works, Blake sought to reclaim engraving's noble heritage, the heritage "of Alber Durer, Lucas [van Leyden] ... and the old original Engravers" (E556), and to disabuse the connoisseur of "the artfully propagated pretence that a Translation or a Copy of any kind can be as honourable to a Nation as An Original" (E565). The aesthetic value of the artist reproducing himself is expressed in the Prospectus to Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims (XVI) of 1809: "It is hoped that the Painter will be allowed by the Public (notwithstanding artfully disseminated insinuations to the contrary) to be better able than any other to keep his own Characters and Expressions; having had sufficient evidence in the Works of our own Hogarth, that no other Artist can reach the original spirit so well as the Painter himself, especially as Mr. B. is an old well-known and acknowledged Engraver" (E556). Blake's defense of himself sounds surprisingly similar to Boydell's 1803 defense of Hogarth: "From the time of the first publication of his Works until the present day, the name of this great and inimitable Artist has been dishonoured by servile and weak Copies of his works. But these cold and spiritless imitations are sunk to mere shadows by a comparison with the Originals, which are in a style peculiar to the great Master who conceived and executed them, and cannot be properly transferred to the Copper by any other Artist" (Josuah Boydell, Alphabetical Catalogue [1803], p. xiv).

Maybe not, but technically such prints are still reproductions since the images were first conceived and executed in other media. Blake and Hogarth simply reproduced and translated themselves into the conventional syntax of line engraving, leaving the acts of pictorial invention and graphic execution divided. As mentioned, engraving was self-referential by sake of the difference between its code and the model's, but it was a difference the public long used to images in translation no longer saw or fully appreciated. It would take more than Landseer's rhetorical reminder to make people see the metal and hand of the engraver, to see the print as print. That something more involved visual effects even more startling than conventional dot and lozenge line systems, effects made possible and unique through an exploiting of the graphic language. We see such an exploitation of medium, tools, and materials in works like Deaths Door (XIII), The Approach of Doom (III), and The Man Sweeping the Interpreter'.s Parlour (XX), in the second states of Job (V), Ezekiel (VI), and Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion (I), in the color prints and second and third states of Albion rose (VII) and The Accusers of Theft Adultery Murder (VIII). These are the prints that define Blake's worth as a creative printmaker; they are not translations or reproductions of preliminary studies, but entirely new recreations.

Creating new and unique visual effects in metal was the most radical method for challenging the secondary status of prints, and Blake was one of the only printmakers to use it. Works like Deaths Door (XIII) and The Alan Sweeping the Interpreter's Parlour (XX) were necessarily outside conventional lines systems because they were invented and executed in terms of experimental techniques, like white-line etching or woodcut on pewter. On the other hand, the second state of Job, as well as the second or third states of five other line engravings (I, VI, VII, VIII) and stipple (XVIII), was pushed beyond convention after the fact, when the entire design [was] reworked dramatically" with burnishers to create new patterns of light and dark (p. 17). In a sense, tampering with the sacrosanct dot and lozenge line system was an even more radical, or at least conceptually more difficult, revisioning of the plate, of what the image and metal mean. Since the technical experiments and chiaroscuro effects are similar to those in Blake's masterpiece, The Book of Job, dating the late states is crucial to our understanding of Blake's development as an artist and thinker. Separate Plates's approach to the problem is exemplary.

The history of Job (V) is a case in point. The first state is inscribed 1793 and exists in a unique impression. The second state, which exists in three impressions (two on India laid paper), is also inscribed 1793. Keynes, Butlin, and Bindman think the later state is 1793 and that the first state is mid-1780s. But based on his discovery in Printmaker (pp. 64-73) that the "imprint dates of engravings ... incised in his copperplates always record the publication of the first state" and that Blake "seems not to have added new dates even when he thoroughly reworked the image and other inscriptions" (p. 19), Essick dates the first state 1793. This means that the "Job, a Historical Engraving ... price 12s" advertised in the 1793 Prospectus was the first state, which was executed in a conventional syntax, and that the second state, marked by "extensive burnishing" (p. 19), was not tied at all to the imprint date. Essick argues persuasively that using burnishers as an element of design indicates a post-1803 date (Printmaker, pp. 178-86).

Blake's use of burnishers to erase lines and create new and even painterly patterns of light and dark may have been motivated by his visit to the Truchsessian Gallery in 1804, or as late as 1818, when he met Linnell. The argument for Linnell's influence is strongest for the second state of Mirth (XVIII), which involves the same techniques as Job and the other late states but cannot be pre-1816, the date of its first state. The argument for Linnell is also based on the fact that burnishing and printing on India proof paper were techniques characteristic of Linnell's practice and not Blake's, and the fact that Linnell owned two impressions of Job and the only known impression of the first state of Mirth. In this reading (which I find persuasive), the later states, instead of being executed in what would have been an extremely anomalous style for 1793, are most likely the work of an old man returning to early plates re-invigorated by the stimulus and practice of a younger artist. This is an example of how Essick uses the circumstantial evidence of technical analyses and provenances to reveal Blake's creative mind.

Essick's theory of Blake's use of burnishers enables him to define the extant impressions of Ezekiel (VI) as the second state, and to propose a hypothetical untraced first state. Ezekiel, which is known only in impressions dated 1794, is clearly Job's companion piece (the image and plate are the same size), but is executed in the same techniques as the burnished second state of Job. His theory also indirectly challenges the validity of Erdman's theory that Blake consistently used a right-pointing serif on his "g"s pre-1791 and post-1803. According to this theory, the third state of The Accusers of Theft Adultery Murder would be pre-1803, since its new inscription contains "g"s with left-tilting serifs. The plate was reworked, however, in the same manner as the other post-1803 states. I prefer to trust Essick's analyses of technique and his speculation regarding the emotional and intellectual changes in Blake's life which motivated them.

The techniques of Blake's first two experimental separate plates, though, have complicated rather than clarified dating. The Stothard-like subject of Charity (II) dates it c. 1789, but its planographic technique relates it to the monotypes of 1794-95. The Approach of Doom (III), which is based on a wash drawing by Robert Blake, has since Gilchrist been thought Blake's first relief etching, a verification of the story that he received the technique in a vision of his brother. Separate Plates dates it c. 1792 because it appears too accomplished to be 1788, the year Blake invented relief etching, and to be stylistically similar to America (1793). These two plates, however, may be related to one another (and to the vignette or tailpiece, plate b, of Songs) and not to the other works, and earlier than dated. Indeed, they may be the first experiments leading to illuminated printing, which makes them worth examining closely.

The idea that Doom is too accomplished to be Blake's first relief etching denies Blake's skill as an artist and the autographic nature of the medium. This argument, by extension, would question Sandby's or Gainsborough's first aquatint for not being more amateurish than it is, as well as Blake's own first white-line etching and woodcuts-on-pewter, and especially his Virgil wood engravings, his first and only in the medium. Blake mastered the basic method of relief etching because its pens, brushes, and dark varnish made executing designs virtually the act of drawing. And this is essentially what Doom is, a pen and wash drawing that reproduced free-hand his brother's pen and wash drawing. The background wash was hatched with a needle to suggest sky and water, which makes it seem similar in technique to America's frontispiece, but it is merely a rudimentary form of hatching that Blake as an engraver would have long been accustomed to using to pattern and form space. It would be far more surprising if this large size drawing (11 3/4 x 8 3/8 inches) in an ink-like solution did not seem accomplished by an artist with twenty years drawing experience. In actual fact, Doom was far easier to execute that the frontispieces of All Religions Are One and There is No Natural Religion, the works believed to be Blake's first experiments in relief etching.

The much smaller and cruder looking works are technically more difficult to execute because their postage stamp size strains the capabilities of brush and pen. They also involve a series of new skills: writing backwards and using a pen with a vicious liquid that clogs and dries quickly when used in small dosages, which in turn hampers the regularity and spontaneity of the script. That Blake encountered such perceptual and technical problems is evident in the text of All Religions Are One, and were not fully overcome till Songs of Innocence (1789). On the other hand, note the subtle gestures of the young men in the frontispiece of No Natural Religion, or the lattice work in the title plate, or the detail in the shepherd, dog, tree, and background hills in plate 4a, an image that is only 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches. Compared especially to the title page of Innocence, its frontispiece, and "Echoing Green," where the white-line work is an integral part of the 2 1/2 x 2 1 /2 inch composition and not just a seemingly random patterning or hatching of space, Doom seems quite crude. In short, the style of Doom required no new skills, and its size did nothing to tax the tools. Indeed, large, simple, and broad forms were the only logical way to use an "ink" that would dry on the brush if not used liberally. The technique seems advanced for relief etching only when compared to the awkwardness of the first texts, not the drawings, which are all well executed, especially considering the minute size of the works. [6]

Charity (II) was also executed as a wash drawing, though without hatching. It seems to have been printed planographically, i.e., drawn on a flat surface in a dark solution that remained wet enough to transfer to paper under minimum pressure. This "technique associates the print with Blake's color printing of 1794 to 1796" (p. 10) but it could also be a prototype for Doom. It is not merely an experiment in transferring an image from a flat surface, which is something every printmaker did when making counterproofs of freshly printed impressions. [7] Rather, Blake seems to be adapting the counterproofing technique to duplicate the spontaneous and autographic marks of pens and brushes, especially the solid blacks impossible to reproduce in engraving. Blake is here duplicating a drawing, rather than producing a conventional print, but can make his duplicate only while the original is wet. This is the principle behind the large color monotypes, where two or three impressions finished as paintings would be a sufficient return on technique, since size and coloring would ensure a higher price. Here, though, Blake is thinking in terms of drawing, not painting, and to ensure a return on small monochrome wash drawings meant fixing brush marks in metal so that they could be printed. And this meant using pens and brushes instead of needles, and an ink that would be acid-resistant. Doom may have been the next step, and Blake's first attempt at drawing in an "impervious liquid." If so, it suggests that illuminated printing was, ironically, like tonal methods, motivated by the desire to duplicate drawings in facsimile, not pre-existent texts, that the technique preceded and was adapted to produce text.

Separate Plates captures Blake's unique mix of virtuosity, professionalism, and creativity, of his working in two distinct graphic traditions, the one original and the other reproductive, in an age that recognized the latter and ignored or feared the former. The very idea of prints as original works of art challenged artistic and social hierarchies, for rarity and cost were no longer part of artistic value. Macklin's definition of prints as "secondary" merely echoed the painter's belief that "pictures of merit and value must ever be confined to the great and the opulent; nor are even copies of such works numerous or of easy acquisition. By the admirable invention of Engraving, in its various branches, imitation of the noblest productions of the pencil are brought within the reach of the individuals of very moderate fortune" (John Dougall, The Cabinet of the Arts:... a New and Universal Drawing Book [1805; 1821], I, ii-iii). Prints were affordable and accessible, whereas master drawings and oil paintings were not. To collect prints was a sign of one's taste and desire for self-improvement, like the collecting of books; it was also to imitate the collecting of the upper classes, and in this sense imitation was acceptance of the status quo. To dismiss prints as secondary, as copies, kept the social and artistic hierarchies in place. To present repeatable images as serious works of original art and to perceive the printmaker as artist, as Blake did, challenged the authority of the "great and opulent" in and out of the Royal Academy; it was as radical as Wordsworth's demanding his simple ballads be taken seriously.

Blake refused to be held to secondary rank in a profession already perceived as artistically second class, its value predicated on its inexpensive reproduction of the ideas of others. He explained the sorry state of printmaking on print dealers creating a public that preferred copies (imitations) and translations over originals. Yet, unlike most engravers, Blake printed in all three forms, making no distinction between copies and translations since both were tied to models not of the engraver's making. The important distinction was between reproductive and original graphics. But his making the distinction and acknowledging the superiority of the tradition of Durer cannot be read as a rejection of reproductive graphics per se. Reproductions might not he as "honourable" to a nation as original prints, but they were socially and educationally valuable, fathered by Raimondi, the printmaker who engraved after Raphael.

A printmaker publishing his own prints, original and reproductive, was not unusual, and most print publishers started as printmakers (David Alexander and Richard Godfrey, Painters and Engraving: The Reproductive Print from Hogarth to Wilkie [1980], pp. 11-13). Blake, in other words, did not publish himself--or invent new techniques--because doors were closed. These he would have done anyway. Essick does not suggest as much, but others have, seeing reproductive and original graphics in a dialectic of craft vs. art, and read Blake's being ignored as evidence of his artistic integrity, of a heroic refusal to submit his will to the marketplace. [8] This is neat but ignores some crucial facts, including Blake's use of stipple in original prints, the viability of both graphic traditions, and, most important, the meaning of his complaint about being ignored: it expressed his desire for more work, not less. He tells Trusler that he preferred to engrave after his own inventions (because it was "less laborous"), but does not "object to Engraving after another Artist. Engraving is the profession I was apprenticed to, & should never have attempted to live by any thing else, If orders had not come in for my Designs & Paintings.... Thus If I am a Painter it is not to be attributed to Seeking after. But I am contented whether I live by Painting or Engraving" (E677). Although his intent here is to criticize Trusler for rejecting what others find valuable and for implying that he could execute but not invent, Blake is truthful. As a printmaker, he knew that engraving was capable of doing and being much more than public or profession had acknowledged, and as an artist knew that structuring the pictorial and graphic hierarchically was mistaken since both were founded on drawing, by which Blake meant invention, or "disegno," and not merely outline. The problem was not reproductive graphics, but the limited perception of the public. Like the angels in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it took a portion of the graphic universe and mistook it for the whole.

Separate Plates is much more than a reference book for curators, connoisseurs, and collectors. It should be read by everyone interested in Blake in particular and printmaking in general. For the Blake student it offers the most insightful analyses to date on the kinds of prints that defined the highest ambitions of Blake's profession, ambitions he shared. The facts of production it so clearly delineates make possible socio-historical examinations of the prints, the role of printmaking in Blake's life, and the effect of its traditions and techniques on his ideas of art. They force us to question the meaning of producing these kinds of plates and in these numbers. Who collected such artifacts? Why? How do they compare with the practice of others? How were they affected by the market, particularly the fashion for facsimiles of drawings and sketches? How was Blake affected by the idea printmakers had of themselves? Art historians, generally indifferent to the graphic arts, must also take note of such Blake experiments as color printing, relief-etching, monotypes, white-line etching, his compositional use of burnishers, his willingness and delight in exploiting media to create unique visual effects, breaking all ties between print and model. They must reevaluate his position in the history of the graphic arts.