University of Virginia Library

William Blake was apprenticed as an engraver on 4 August 1772 and served a seven year term under James Basire, one of the most successful engravers of the time. Basire's speciality was reproducing drawings of architecture and sculpture in works such as Stuart & Revett's Antiquities of Athens Measured and Delineated (1762-1816), [Richard Gough's] Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain (1786, 1796), and Jacob Bryant's Analysis

of Ancient Mythology (1774, 1776), and Blake worked on these and other learned volumes of the time during his apprenticeship. He was meticulously taught all the conventional skills of his craft while he lived with Basire, and he always defended his master vigorously: "Woolett did not know how to put so much labour into a head or a foot as Basire did".[1] By 1809 he could say truly in his Prospectus for his Chaucer engraving, "Mr. B. is an old well-known and acknowledged Engraver", and he was rightly confident of his ability: "I defy any Man to Cut Cleaner Strokes than I do or rougher where I please" (Notebook, p. 25). "If a man is master of his profession, he cannot be ignorant that he is so . . . ."[2]

Blake had mastered the various standard reproductive techniques of his time, in line-engraving (e.g., Job [1826]), stipple (Flaxman's Hesiod [1817]), etching (the first state of the plate after Hogarth for Gay's Beggar's Opera [1790]), and wood engraving (Virgil [1821]), and, had his character been different, he might well have been President of the Chalcographical Society, as was his sometime fellow apprentice and partner James Parker. He also experimented vigorously with the new techniques such as lithography, which was introduced into England about 1803—his "Enoch" lithograph was probably made about 1807—and he adapted and invented a number of techniques for his own purposes. Blake would have been remembered as a chalcographical innovator, even had he not been a great engraver, designer, colourist—and poet. The purpose of what follows is primarily to lay forth the contemporary verbal evidence about Blake's engraving and copperplate-printing techniques.

Not long after he was out of his apprenticeship indentures in 1779, Blake began experimenting with reproductive techniques. The subject was much in the air at the time: in France and England Franz Ignaz Joseph Hoffman and Alexander Tilloch were making experiments, and Blake's friend George Cumberland wrote excitedly to his brother about his discoveries and published them as his "New Mode of Engraving", New Review, IV (Nov 1784), summarized in the European Magazine (1784). Cumberland's discovery was that the relatively simple technique of etching designs could be adapted by amateurs to etching texts; the chief drawback, a relatively minor one Cumberland thought, was that the text would ordinarily be printed backwards and could be read easily only with a mirror. In Cumberland's technique, it was the dark lines which were etched and printed. Blake's technique of Illuminated Printing was a very considerable extension of Cumberland's and was probably made about the same time, for his Island in the Moon (?1784) evidently once had a passage describing a method of "Illuminating the [Engraved] Manuscript".

Blake's method of Illuminated Printing differed in at least three important respects from Cumberland's: 1) The writing on the copper was put on

in mirror-writing, so that it would print right-way round on the paper; 2) Designs were added to the text, so that the finished work was not just a different and inexpensive method of printing words but an almost entirely new technique uniting text and design which he called Illuminated Printing; 3) The etching was in relief (the reverse of the ordinary, intaglio, method), so that the ink is transferred from the raised surfaces rather from the recessed hollows. Thus an "O", for example, is made not by drawing or gouging a circle (as in intaglio etching) but by removing the outside and the hole, leaving a kind of volcano, the top of which prints the letter. All three techniques were in a sense commonplaces. Titles were regularly added in mirror-writing to engraved designs, and the ancient craft of woodcutting is essentially relief-engraving on wood.[3] Blake's genius lay largely in combining and perfecting the techniques for his own special purposes. In particular, he seems to have become extraordinarily skillful at mirror-writing, so that the etched words would come out right-way round when printed. His friend George Cumberland wrote in 1810 that "Blake . . . alone excels in that art" of reading, writing [and engraving] backwards,[4] and his disciple John Linnell commented after his death that "The most extraordinary facility seems to have been attained by Blake in writing backwards & that with a brush dipped in a glutinous liquid".[5]

Presumably all engravers were trained in mirror-writing, but few did so well or often. Note that the art of writing backwards on copper was a separate sub-division of the engraver's craft and that there were Writing Engravers such as William Staden Blake (fl. 1770-1817) who specialized in it. Frequently, probably normally, the design-engraver would turn his finished plate over to the publisher, who would then commission a Writing Engraver to add the lettering, including the title and the crucial imprint with the day of publication, e.g., "Published as the Act directs by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1 Jan. 1817". Blake, for instance, brought in his plates after Flaxman's Hesiod designs to Longman beginning in 1814, but it was not until 21 June 1816 that they paid £4.18 to "Jeffreys [for adding] Writing to 14 plate &c.mmat; 7/.—" (Blake Records, 579).

However, Blake not only lettered all his own separate plates and works in Illuminated Printing, but he sometimes lettered his commercial plates for other men's books. For example, he wrote to Hayley on 16 March 1804 about his plate for the third volume of Hayley's Life . . . of William Cowper: "The inscriptions to the Plates I must beg of you to send to me that I may Engrave them immediately". This may, however, have been an exceptional case, because of Blake's friendship with Hayley. It seems likely that the inscriptions

on most of Blake's commercial plates for books were made by other men.[6]

The invention of Blake's method of Illuminated Printing was thus described by Blake's acquaintance of 1784, J. T. Smith:

With this technique of Illuminated Printing, Blake produced almost all his published works, from Songs of Innocence (1789) and The Book of Thel (1789) to Jerusalem (1804-?20) and The Ghost of Abel (1822). So far as I know, the technique had never been used before Blake's time and has not been practised since. The most unusual feature of Blake's method was that he did not cover his plate with wax and cut away "the plain parts or lights"; instead he drew on the copper directly with a fast-drying liquid impervious to acid. The nature of this remarkable liquid is not known with confidence, though recent experiments by Professor Robert Essick indicate that it may have been either the usual stopping out varnish, "pitch . . . diluted with Terps", or some other comparatively common substance. Smith wrote that

Blake described his own techniques of engraving and printing a number of times, mostly for his friend the dilletante artist and inventor George Cumberland.

He helped Cumberland with etching the designs for Cumberland's Thoughts on Outline (1796), and in a letter of 6 December 1795 he told him:

Cumberland was profoundly grateful for the assistance, and in the Thoughts on Outline he wrote:

Blake made a memorandum in his Notebook (p. 4), perhaps at this time, about etching or engraving on relatively soft and cheap pewter (rather than copper), the technique being a standard one of transferring a pencil drawing, reversed, to the wax-covered plate; about white-line engraving on pewter; and about white-line etching on copper:

Blake evidently told George Cumberland about this method of woodcutting on metal, for on the back of a letter of James Irvine of 16 December 1794 Cumberland made a memorandum about "Blakes method, biting whites".[11]

Cumberland continued to be interested in Blake's methods of engraving. He evidently acquired one of the very few copies of Blake's lithograph of "Enoch" (?1807), and on the back of it he wrote down

Lias is a limestone rock found in the South of England, which C. Hullmandel, The Art of Drawing on Stone (1824), 2, says "is too soft and porous" for printing, compared with the German lithographic stone. "Tripoli" or "Rotten Stone" is a fine earth used as a powder for polishing metals. The ink used here seems very unusual. Cumberland may well have followed these directions in the lithographs for his own Scenes, Chiefly Italian (1824).

Blake seems actually to have recorded in print some of his inventions, though these may have now been lost. In his notebooks for 1804-8, Cumberland repeatedly made notes to himself:

These rules may well have been about engraving. Cumberland was anxious that the invention should be recorded in print, and in his notebook for the summer of 1807 he wrote that "Blake . . . intends to publish his new method through means[?] of stopping lights" (Blake Records, 187). On 18 December 1808 he wrote to Blake: To this Blake replied on the 19th:

Blake's inventions in engraving and printing are not known to have been published in 1809 or later, and Cumberland consequently noted eagerly other inventions which were like Blake's. On 22 January 1819 he wrote to his son:

The method is apparently that of relief-etching on copper, about which Cumberland fairly obviously knew, and consequently it would be of very great interest to locate this note by Sivewright in a "Philosophical Journal". The author may be "John Sivewright, Teacher of Music" (c. 1770-1846) who wrote a Collection of Church Tunes & Anthems (Edinburgh, c. 1805); he is probably the John Sievwright, Engraver, who appears in the Edinburgh city directories for 1805-15.[15] However, no article has been identified which corresponds to the one Cumberland described. His information may have come, perhaps through a friend, from

• 1) Anon., "Art. V—Account of a new Style of Engraving on Copper in Alto Relievo, invented by W[illiam Home] Lizars. Drawn up from information communicated by the Inventor", Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, II (April 1820), 19-23, in which Lizars says he "was much indebted" "during these experiments" to "Mr Sivright of Meggetland" (a suburb of Edinburgh), but he does not mention "Copper Blocks";
• 2) The reprint of the bulk of Lizar's account in The Gentlemen's Magazine, XCI (1821), 625-6, citing "Edinburgh Philosophical Journal";
• 3) Anon., "A New Style of Engraving, invented by Mr. Lizars", London Journal of Arts and Science, I (1820), 78-79, which does not refer to "Copper Blocks", Sivewright, or The Edinburgh Philosophical Journal; and
• 4) Charles Pye, "Mr. Pye on Engraving on Metal and Stone. On a new Process of Engraving on Metal and Stone", London Journal of Arts and Sciences, I (1820), 55-58, which describes Pye's own experiments made "five years" earlier than the "account of the Process of Engraving on Copper Blocks into alto relievo by Mr. Lizars" "in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal", but which does not mention Mr Sivewright.

None of these accounts mentions both "Copper Blocks" and Mr Sivewright, as Cumberland does.

There is a further, chronological, difficulty, for all four of the articles were published in 1820 and 1821.[16] Without yet another date, after January

1819, for the obscured date-stamp in Cumberland's letter, or another, earlier account of Sivewright's Copper Blocks in some Philosophical Journal, we are left with a mystery as to where Cumberland found his information. Though we know a great deal on Blake's own authority about his methods of engraving, we still do not know with confidence about his method of reliefetching producing "Copper Blocks" as in stereotype for his works in Illuminated Printing.