William Blake, an English poet, painter, engraver,…

William Blake, an English poet, painter, engraver, visionary mystic and a redhead, is one of the earliest and greatest figures of Romanticism.

Ignored by the public of his day, he is called mad because he is single-minded and unworldly.

His hand-illustrated series of lyrical and epic poems, beginning with Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), form one of the most strikingly original and independent bodies of work in the Western cultural tradition.

Blake lives on the edge of poverty, however.

John Linnell, one of the best friends and kindest patrons of Blake, has given him the two largest commissions he has ever received for single series of designs—£150 for drawings and engravings of The Inventions to the Book of Job (1823), and a like sum for those illustrative of Dante Aligheri.

Born in Bloomsbury, London, his father being a carver and gilder, Linnell had been brought into contact with artists from an early age, and was drawing and selling his portraits in chalk and pencil at the age of ten.

His first artistic instruction had been received from Benjamin West, and he had spent a year in the house of the water-color painter John Varley, where he had William Henry Hunt and William Mulready as fellow-pupils, and made the acquaintance of Percy Shelley, William Godwin and other men of mark.

In 1805 he was admitted a student of the Royal Academy, where he obtained medals for drawing, modeling and sculpture.

Also trained as an engraver, he had executed a transcript of Varley's "Burial of Saul."