William Blake's Designs for Edward Young's Night Thoughts. A complete edition
In
1795 Blake was commissioned to illustrate a new four-volume deluxe edition of The Complaint, and the Consolation; or,
Night Thoughts by Edward Young. First published from 1742 to 1745, Young's
meditative poem of almost ten thousand lines of blank verse remained popular
throughout
the eighteenth century. In the advertisement to the engraved edition (1797),
Richard Edwards, the publisher, makes "no apology . . . for giving to the great
work of Young some of those advantages of dress and ornament which have lately
distinguished the immortal productions of Shakespeare and Milton." But unlike
all other illustrated editions of popular classics in that period, which placed
engravings opposite the text, Blake's illustrations are placed on the same
pages as the poems, actually encircling the text. In this format Blake produced
within two years a series of 537 watercolor designs from which 150 were to be
selected and engraved. With "public encouragement proving inadequate, [1] however, only one volume,
consisting of the first four of nine "Nights" with 43 engravings by Blake, was
ever issued. (See illustration, page 56.)
This
Oxford reproduction of all the engravings and watercolor designs, with
commentary, was to be published in five volumes. However, volumes three and
four (the commentary) are still in preparation, and plans to publish a fifth
volume, it seems, have been dropped.
The
text in volumes one and two is limited: a ninety-page introduction of which the
two most helpful sections are "Evolution of the Designs," a brief discussion of
possible preliminary drawings, and "Copies of the Engraved Work," which puts
forth a much-needed new census and system of coding colored copies. But it is
the 728 reproductions (78 in color) of all the watercolors, engravings, and
proofs of early states of most of the engravings that make these two volumes so
valuable—and, in certain ways, disappointing.
The
colors in the reproductions are dull and have hard edges that belie the subtle
gradations in the originals. Yellows look dirty; greens, pinks, and light blues
are darkened; flesh tones are washed out. But it is not necessary to compare
the reproductions with the originals to know that Blake's colors must have been
done an injustice. The originals were reduced about thirty percent. Watercolor,
a medium difficult to reproduce in the best of photomechanical processes,
simply cannot be reproduced accurately when the entire spectrum of color and
tone of the original is compressed into a smaller area. With less room for
gradations, there are losses of color and tonal values (what is called "mudding
up"). Unlike oil and tempera, watercolors have no body; their characteristic
brightness is due to the whiteness of the paper showing through the transparent
washes. Therefore, colors and tone are also adversely affected because the
color of the paper of the original drawings is cream but has been reproduced as
gray. The color reproductions give little sense of Blake's mastery of his medium,
of the technical difficulty of laying in colors over so large an area. There is
an intensely energetic and joyful feeling in these designs that the color
reproductions, unfortunately, understate and the monochrome reproductions
merely suggest.
Perhaps
it is unfair to criticize the monochrome reproductions for not giving us a good
idea of the watercolor designs since Blake's own engravings also fail to do so.
Even so, the engravings are, as engravings, better than their reproduction here
would have us believe. In Blake's translations of watercolor washes into
engraved lines, there is, admittedly, much that is conventional. The
dot-and-lozenge and parallel-line systems seen in 9E, for example, are the work
of a professional reproductive engraver ruled by the exigencies of the medium,
not the spirit of the design. Though Blake's illustration format—encircling the
text with illustration—is innovative, he is not experimenting with or
exploiting the engraving medium in new ways as he did in relief etching and in
his Job engravings. On the other
hand, 32E shows just how good some of his plates are. The watercolor design for
it (NT 117) is loosely drawn and executed: Trees, bushes, and hills are painted
as flat areas in various shades of green (not unlike Francis Towne's
watercolors). In the plate these areas are given form and detail by a wide
variety of lines, from conventional worm lines in the foreground to the quick,
loose, and open lines associated with mid-nineteenth-century pure etching.
Engraving 26E looks as though it might reproduce the watercolor design (NT 87) well, but it does not. The watercolor design is virtually a finished painting, and, like Blake's watercolor designs in general, it is by no means simply a preliminary design for the plate: The washes serve the painting; they do not serve to indicate light and dark for the engraver. Likewise, Blake was creative in the engraving process. Having a design to reproduce did not in all cases serve to lock creativity out of the reproductive process—or, to use eighteenth-century parlance, it did not deny execution its role in invention. In 32E the face of Death and the fur of Death's two dogs have been changed dramatically; in 17E, the bottom figure, only suggested in the watercolor, has been highly finished. The designs, after all, were Blake's to change—something he tells us in his monogram: "W.B. inv & sc."
Dover
Publications in 1975 reproduced in paperback the very same copy of the engraved
edition of Night Thoughts that Oxford
reproduces in cloth cover here. Dover reproduced the book "in line," an
inexpensive process that prints black and white only; thus, the engraved lines
are without variations in tone. Oxford used a halftone screen, but because
reduction compresses white interstices of the line system, the engravings
appear darker, sharper, and more tightly composed than they actually are. Not
only are the engravings in the Oxford edition reduced in size, but also, like
the watercolor designs, they are given a uniform inch margin on all sides,
making them appear like individually matted plates rather than book pages,
which have unequal margins. The Dover edition, although also smaller than the
original, actually gives a better sense of the original edition as a book.
In one sense, criticizing the quality of the reproductions as I have done and expect others to do is unwarranted. Even though the two volumes cost $365, we must keep in mind that these are, after all, reproductions, not facsimiles. To appreciate the difference between a reproduction and a facsimile, we need only to compare this edition of Night Thoughts with the Blake Trust 1972 edition of Blake's designs to Gray's Poems. Those 116 designs are also watercolors, on the same size sheets, and in the same format as Blake's Night Thoughts designs. They were reproduced by the Trianon Press, however, using a collotype and hand-stencil process on Arches pure rag paper, the tone and size of which was made to match the paper used by Blake. An average of twenty-five colors were applied by hand, with as many as forty-two stencils for a single plate—an average of 2,900 applications per volume, or about 1,503,200 such operations for the limited edition of 518 copies! The edges of the colors were softened by watercolor brushes, and the facsimiles checked and corrected at each stage against their originals. The texts of Gray's poems were printed from copper plates; pencil marks in the original copy and the tone of the paper were produced by three additional printings. No wonder it took Arnold Fawcus, director of Trianon Press, and eighteen employees four years to reproduce what Blake did in less than one. For their effort they produced facsimiles "virtually indistinguishable from the originals" [2]—and a book that cost #530.
The
reason that "the public cannot be provided with an inexpensive edition of
Blake's works in color . . . the form in which he intended them to be seen,"
was told in a Times commentary: "A
cheap process of reproduction can only provide a substitute that cannot be
compared with the beauty of Blake's original works." [3] The worst that can be said
about the reproductions in Oxford's edition of Night Thoughts is that they are a good substitute—not cheap, to be
sure, but considering the relative prices of the Oxford and Trianon editions,
it should come as no surprise that the quality of the Oxford plates is not up
to Trianon's standards. We cannot expect to be given a sense of the art work
as
artifact from a reference-book reproduction—even the best facsimile is only
second best—and what we have here is a good, handsome, intelligently edited
reference book that all students of Blake, book illustration, Romantic art, and
watercolor painting can use to great advantage. Indeed, these Night Thoughts designs, which have been
in the British Museum since 1929 (and consequently available to only a lucky
few), constitute nearly one-fourth of Blake's entire pictorial output. Their
reproduction is as indispensable to the study of Blake's oeuvre as David
Bindman's Complete Graphic Works of William Blake (1978) and Martin
Butlin's The Paintings and Drawings of
William Blake—the recently published two-volume catalogue
raisonnee (which omits only the illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts and Gray's
Poems).
Having
access to the watercolor designs and the engravings will make it possible to
examine the differences between Night Thoughts
as originally conceived and as
published. Are the differences due to a change of medium or mind? As mentioned,
only the first four of the nine "Nights" were printed, only 43 of 156 possible
designs engraved, and these are spread over ninety-five pages of text.
Consequently, few of the original engravings face one another, which only
reinforces the idea that Blake was unconcerned with, or incapable of thinking
in terms of, the diptych, or page spread. Yet, in the Oxford edition, in NT
35-36, 45-46, 71-72, 93-94,139-40,141-42, 211-12, 320-21, to name just a few
watercolor sets, we see Blake using two pages to create a balanced whole or to
move a reader's eye across an open space. Oxford's reproductions actually give
us a better idea of Blake's ability to work within the basic two-page book
spread convention than do the original watercolors which are now bound in
Plexiglas and viewed as individual paintings, not as book pages, seen two at a
time.
The Night Thoughts reproductions, in
conjunction with the two catalogues mentioned above, will also make it possible
to examine Blake's development as an illustrator and artist, and to discern how
some of his designs echo or anticipate others, technically, compositionally,
and thematically. Section four of the introduction is a good start in this
examination.
The Night Thoughts designs,
as the Oxford editors readily acknowledge, were quickly invented, the result of
Blake freely borrowing symbols, characters, and subjects that he had developed
during his previous seven years' work in illuminated printing and poetry.
Indeed, these designs are a grand repository of Blake's images and ideas, of
his visual language. Their reproduction will not only shed light on Blake's
reading of Young, but also on our reading of Blake, the symbolism in his
illuminated books, and Christology in his later paintings. As a reference tool,
the value of the Oxford edition depends less on the quality of reproduction
than on how well and often we use it.