Paolo and Francesca

This drawing was owned by the artist Graham Robertson (1866-1948), who formed the most important collection of the artist’s work, including many of the drawings Blake executed for his chief patron Thomas Butts. Robertson brought out a new illustrated edition of Gilchrist’s, The Life of William Blake, loaned works from his collection internationally while he was alive and after his death left twenty-one works to the Tate, three to the British Museum and six to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and then individual works to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery of Scotland, Southampton Art Gallery and Brighton Museum. The remaining works from his collection were sold in these Rooms, 22 July 1949. This drawing was the only work by another artist, included in Graham Robertson’s exhibition of his own work in 1906 to accompany his version in reverse.

Kerrison Preston, who edited The Blake Collection of W. Graham Robertson, op.cit., thought the present drawing a sketch for the Paolo and Francesca of the Whirlwind of Lovers (City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham) and notes it as an instance of the success of Blake’s arbitrary treatment of the human figure, the pose of Francesca although impossible conveying the effect of motion. Robertson himself notes on the present drawing 'Though the lines are few and dim, the figures seem to whirl across the page, desperately locked in their eternal embrace.’ (Preston, loc. cit.)

Robert Essick has queried Tatham's supposition in his inscription that the subject is Paolo and Francesca, because of differences in pose to the Birmingham watercolor. In that work the figures are holding each other by the arms, rather than embracing. The drawing has strong similarities with Fuseli's drawing of entwined figures, for example Schiff, no. 1583, dated to circa 1815.