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Lot Essay
Songs of Experience, in which the much-anthologized poem 'The Tyger' first appeared, was first advertised in Blake’s prospectus of 1793, when the artist was 35. It was listed with several other works, including the separate Songs of Innocence, for five shillings each. While no extant copy of that engraved prospectus survives today, in the 1860s it was obtained and transcribed by Alexander Gilchrist in Life of William Blake, ‘Pictor Ignotus’ (Macmillan, 1863). Its grandeur—characteristic of Blake—is worth quoting in part:
'The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.
This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the following productions now presented to the Public; who has invented a method of printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense.
If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward…'
He closes by stating that these works are 'on Sale at Mr. Blake’s, No. 13, Hercules Buildings, Lambeth.' Songs of Experience was first produced late summer and early autumn 1793 as a standalone work with 17 plates, while it was still in progress. There would be only four copies of this first printing, however, before he decided to combine Experience with Innocence under a single title page, Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
Blake originally conceived Experience as a direct response to Innocence, poem for poem. Though there are instances of this—both include poems such as 'The Chimney-Sweeper' and 'Nurse’s Song,' for example—it evolved into a more general representation of opposition and contraries. Poems such as 'London,' 'A Poison Tree,' and 'The Human Abstract' are bleak and austere, conveying hardship and woe. Whereas in Innocence we have the Piper and his lambs, in Experience we have the voice of the Bard with words that call to mind John Milton’s Paradise Lost: 'Calling the lapsed Soul / And weeping in the evening dew: / That might control / The starry pole: / And fallen fallen light renew!' In Innocence’s 'The Chimney Sweeper,' Blake’s bleak commentary on child labor practices, an Angel visits the boy at night and gives him a pastoral glimpse of what childhood should be like—'Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run, / And wash in a river and shine in the Sun. / Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, / They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind'—before imparting the hope of obedience earning him a better life in heaven. In Experience’s version of the poem, even this small glimmer of hope is gone and organized religion is directly called out, as are parents and society writ large: 'Where are thy father & mother? Say? / They are both gone up to the church to pray.' They have clothed him in 'clothes of death' and 'think they have done [him] no injury, / And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King, / Who make up a heaven of our misery.' Innocence’s 'The Lamb' and Experience’s 'The Tyger' also pair together: where 'The Lamb' is almost a hymn, celebrating creation, 'The Tyger' instead questions it, and asks why God allows evil to exist. In 'Nurse’s Song,' the version in Innocence cherishes the voices of children wafting in from the green, whereas in Experience, the Nurse sees no innocence in childhood: her 'face turns green and pale' when her own youth comes to mind and she tells her charges, 'Your spring & your day, are wasted in play / And your winter and night in disguise.'
Blake completed his drafts of Songs of Experience in the summer of 1793 and selected 14 poems together with a frontispiece, title-page, and introduction—for a total of 17 plates—to be relief etched and printed on rectos only. As here in Copy H, the poems comprised Earth’s Answer, The Clod & the Pebble, A Poison Tree, The Fly, Holy Thursday, The Chimney Sweeper, London, The Tyger, A Little Boy Lost, The Human Abstract, The Angel, My Pretty Rose Tree, Nurses Song, and A Little Girl Lost. As Phillips writes, 'This was the order of the plates in Songs of Experience Copy H, described in 1828 by J.T. Smith, that has been preserved stitched in buff paper wrappers as it left Blake’s hands' (William Blake: The Creation of the Songs from Manuscript to Illuminated Printing, p.97). Though this copy is no longer sewn and the plates are loose, its original wrappers remain.
This first printing of Experience was color-printed by Blake and finished in watercolor (though Innocence was printed in color, it is considered 'monochrome' and not 'color-printed' as it used only one color). Michael Phillips notes that 'Blake’s colour-printed works represent his supreme achievement as a graphic artist, set in train by his experiments and extraordinary innovations employed in the production of the first copies of Songs of Experience.' As with Innocence, Blake prepared Experience using relief etching. And as he boasts in his prospectus, his innovative method allowed him to control all aspects of the book’s production: he could write the poetry and compose the designs, and transfer them to the copper plate for printing. Notably, by 1793, Blake had further developed his process to include a means for color printing that Phillips refers to, though the exact method by which he did so has been disputed by scholars. Regardless of how it was achieved, it relied on Blake tempering his watercolors, turning them into a sticky ink-like substance that he could use for printing. Each sheet was then finished with watercolor by hand by Blake or his wife, Catherine, before stitching the book together in paper wrappers—the only surviving example of which are found here, in Copy H.
Phillips notes that there are variations in the printing of the text and designs between each of the four copies, making each each one unique. The four copies of the first printing are:
· Copy F, complete, originally owned by Blake patron and friend George Cumberland and now in the Yale Center for British Art;
· Copy G, dispersed in the 19th century. 12 plates collected by Sir Geoffrey Keynes are now at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and at least 2 plates are in private collections;
· Copy H, complete, the present Sendak copy, originally owned by the miniature painter and Blake patron Ozias Humphry; and
· Copy T1, lacking one plate, now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa as part of a composite set of the combined Songs.
After these four copies, Blake color-printed only a handful of other plates for Experience before reverting to monochrome text and designs: these plates are present with varying degrees of the technique in copies B, C, and D, which were printed next and were the first copies of the combined Songs to be produced, as well as E, which was compiled for Blake’s patron Thomas Butts. These copies were printed recto/verso (unlike the first four that were rectos only) and due to the logistics of the facing plates when bound, Phillips notes that the 'colour-printed plates that are present in these copies have been colour-printed using very little pigment, sometimes making it difficult to be sure if they have been colour-printed' at all (p.103). After 1794, Blake no longer color-printed Songs of Experience.
This is the only copy of the first printing of Songs of Experience to ever appear at auction, where it was last recorded in 1948. It is one of only four copies produced, and of these, one of only two complete copies. It is the only one in private hands. The printing history of the Songs is complicated due to their printing and compilation over the course of decades, but after 1794, although copies of Songs of Innocence continued to be issued separately, no copy of Songs of Experience was issued apart or separate from Songs of Innocence. Approximately 30 copies of the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience are extant; of these, only five are in private hands and one is untraced. 'This volume is the only copy of Songs of Experience to survive as it was obtained from Blake,' untrimmed with its buff paper wrappers (Phillips, p. 104).
Small octavo (193 x 128mm). J. Whatman watermark. Comprising 17 relief etchings on 17 leaves, color printed and finished in watercolor, disbound. Original buff wrappers. Custom red morocco clamshell box.
Works cited
Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997.
Bentley, Jr. G.E. Blake Books. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
---. Blake Records. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
---. 'G.E. Bentley: Blake Collection.' William Blake: Poet & Printmaker. https://library.vicu.utoronto.ca/collections/special_collections/bentley_blake_collection/. Accessed April 2025.
---. 'Ozias Humphry, William Upcott, and William Blake.' Humanities Association Review 26 (1975): 116-120.
Blake, William and Andrew Lincoln, ed. Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Blake’s Illuminated Works, Volume 2. General editor David Bindman. Princeton UP and the William Blake Trust, 1998.
Butlin, Martin. William Blake. London: Tate Gallery, 1978.
Essick, Robert and Joseph Viscomi, eds. The William Blake Archive. www.williamblakearchive.org. Accessed April 2025.
Essick, Robert. Sendak and Blake Illustrating Songs of Innocence. New York: Battledore Ltd & Society of Illustrations, 2008.
---. William Blake, Printmaker. Princeton UP, 1980.
Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of William Blake, 'Pictor Ignotus.' London: Macmillan and Co., 1863.
Hamlyn, Robin and Michael Phillips. William Blake. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2000.
Keynes, Geoffrey & Edwin Wolf, 2nd. William Blake’s Illuminated Books: A Census. New York: the Grolier Club, 1953.
Keynes, Geoffrey, ed. The Letters of William Blake. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968.
Myrone, Martin and Amy Concannon, eds. William Blake. Princeton UP, 2019.
Phillips, Michael. William Blake: The Creation of the Songs from Manuscript to Illuminated Printing. London: The British Library, 2000.
Smith, John Thomas. Nollekens and his times. London: H. Colburn, 1828.
'The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.
This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the following productions now presented to the Public; who has invented a method of printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense.
If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward…'
He closes by stating that these works are 'on Sale at Mr. Blake’s, No. 13, Hercules Buildings, Lambeth.' Songs of Experience was first produced late summer and early autumn 1793 as a standalone work with 17 plates, while it was still in progress. There would be only four copies of this first printing, however, before he decided to combine Experience with Innocence under a single title page, Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
Blake originally conceived Experience as a direct response to Innocence, poem for poem. Though there are instances of this—both include poems such as 'The Chimney-Sweeper' and 'Nurse’s Song,' for example—it evolved into a more general representation of opposition and contraries. Poems such as 'London,' 'A Poison Tree,' and 'The Human Abstract' are bleak and austere, conveying hardship and woe. Whereas in Innocence we have the Piper and his lambs, in Experience we have the voice of the Bard with words that call to mind John Milton’s Paradise Lost: 'Calling the lapsed Soul / And weeping in the evening dew: / That might control / The starry pole: / And fallen fallen light renew!' In Innocence’s 'The Chimney Sweeper,' Blake’s bleak commentary on child labor practices, an Angel visits the boy at night and gives him a pastoral glimpse of what childhood should be like—'Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run, / And wash in a river and shine in the Sun. / Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, / They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind'—before imparting the hope of obedience earning him a better life in heaven. In Experience’s version of the poem, even this small glimmer of hope is gone and organized religion is directly called out, as are parents and society writ large: 'Where are thy father & mother? Say? / They are both gone up to the church to pray.' They have clothed him in 'clothes of death' and 'think they have done [him] no injury, / And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King, / Who make up a heaven of our misery.' Innocence’s 'The Lamb' and Experience’s 'The Tyger' also pair together: where 'The Lamb' is almost a hymn, celebrating creation, 'The Tyger' instead questions it, and asks why God allows evil to exist. In 'Nurse’s Song,' the version in Innocence cherishes the voices of children wafting in from the green, whereas in Experience, the Nurse sees no innocence in childhood: her 'face turns green and pale' when her own youth comes to mind and she tells her charges, 'Your spring & your day, are wasted in play / And your winter and night in disguise.'
Blake completed his drafts of Songs of Experience in the summer of 1793 and selected 14 poems together with a frontispiece, title-page, and introduction—for a total of 17 plates—to be relief etched and printed on rectos only. As here in Copy H, the poems comprised Earth’s Answer, The Clod & the Pebble, A Poison Tree, The Fly, Holy Thursday, The Chimney Sweeper, London, The Tyger, A Little Boy Lost, The Human Abstract, The Angel, My Pretty Rose Tree, Nurses Song, and A Little Girl Lost. As Phillips writes, 'This was the order of the plates in Songs of Experience Copy H, described in 1828 by J.T. Smith, that has been preserved stitched in buff paper wrappers as it left Blake’s hands' (William Blake: The Creation of the Songs from Manuscript to Illuminated Printing, p.97). Though this copy is no longer sewn and the plates are loose, its original wrappers remain.
This first printing of Experience was color-printed by Blake and finished in watercolor (though Innocence was printed in color, it is considered 'monochrome' and not 'color-printed' as it used only one color). Michael Phillips notes that 'Blake’s colour-printed works represent his supreme achievement as a graphic artist, set in train by his experiments and extraordinary innovations employed in the production of the first copies of Songs of Experience.' As with Innocence, Blake prepared Experience using relief etching. And as he boasts in his prospectus, his innovative method allowed him to control all aspects of the book’s production: he could write the poetry and compose the designs, and transfer them to the copper plate for printing. Notably, by 1793, Blake had further developed his process to include a means for color printing that Phillips refers to, though the exact method by which he did so has been disputed by scholars. Regardless of how it was achieved, it relied on Blake tempering his watercolors, turning them into a sticky ink-like substance that he could use for printing. Each sheet was then finished with watercolor by hand by Blake or his wife, Catherine, before stitching the book together in paper wrappers—the only surviving example of which are found here, in Copy H.
Phillips notes that there are variations in the printing of the text and designs between each of the four copies, making each each one unique. The four copies of the first printing are:
· Copy F, complete, originally owned by Blake patron and friend George Cumberland and now in the Yale Center for British Art;
· Copy G, dispersed in the 19th century. 12 plates collected by Sir Geoffrey Keynes are now at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and at least 2 plates are in private collections;
· Copy H, complete, the present Sendak copy, originally owned by the miniature painter and Blake patron Ozias Humphry; and
· Copy T1, lacking one plate, now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa as part of a composite set of the combined Songs.
After these four copies, Blake color-printed only a handful of other plates for Experience before reverting to monochrome text and designs: these plates are present with varying degrees of the technique in copies B, C, and D, which were printed next and were the first copies of the combined Songs to be produced, as well as E, which was compiled for Blake’s patron Thomas Butts. These copies were printed recto/verso (unlike the first four that were rectos only) and due to the logistics of the facing plates when bound, Phillips notes that the 'colour-printed plates that are present in these copies have been colour-printed using very little pigment, sometimes making it difficult to be sure if they have been colour-printed' at all (p.103). After 1794, Blake no longer color-printed Songs of Experience.
This is the only copy of the first printing of Songs of Experience to ever appear at auction, where it was last recorded in 1948. It is one of only four copies produced, and of these, one of only two complete copies. It is the only one in private hands. The printing history of the Songs is complicated due to their printing and compilation over the course of decades, but after 1794, although copies of Songs of Innocence continued to be issued separately, no copy of Songs of Experience was issued apart or separate from Songs of Innocence. Approximately 30 copies of the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience are extant; of these, only five are in private hands and one is untraced. 'This volume is the only copy of Songs of Experience to survive as it was obtained from Blake,' untrimmed with its buff paper wrappers (Phillips, p. 104).
Small octavo (193 x 128mm). J. Whatman watermark. Comprising 17 relief etchings on 17 leaves, color printed and finished in watercolor, disbound. Original buff wrappers. Custom red morocco clamshell box.
Works cited
Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997.
Bentley, Jr. G.E. Blake Books. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
---. Blake Records. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
---. 'G.E. Bentley: Blake Collection.' William Blake: Poet & Printmaker. https://library.vicu.utoronto.ca/collections/special_collections/bentley_blake_collection/. Accessed April 2025.
---. 'Ozias Humphry, William Upcott, and William Blake.' Humanities Association Review 26 (1975): 116-120.
Blake, William and Andrew Lincoln, ed. Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Blake’s Illuminated Works, Volume 2. General editor David Bindman. Princeton UP and the William Blake Trust, 1998.
Butlin, Martin. William Blake. London: Tate Gallery, 1978.
Essick, Robert and Joseph Viscomi, eds. The William Blake Archive. www.williamblakearchive.org. Accessed April 2025.
Essick, Robert. Sendak and Blake Illustrating Songs of Innocence. New York: Battledore Ltd & Society of Illustrations, 2008.
---. William Blake, Printmaker. Princeton UP, 1980.
Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of William Blake, 'Pictor Ignotus.' London: Macmillan and Co., 1863.
Hamlyn, Robin and Michael Phillips. William Blake. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2000.
Keynes, Geoffrey & Edwin Wolf, 2nd. William Blake’s Illuminated Books: A Census. New York: the Grolier Club, 1953.
Keynes, Geoffrey, ed. The Letters of William Blake. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968.
Myrone, Martin and Amy Concannon, eds. William Blake. Princeton UP, 2019.
Phillips, Michael. William Blake: The Creation of the Songs from Manuscript to Illuminated Printing. London: The British Library, 2000.
Smith, John Thomas. Nollekens and his times. London: H. Colburn, 1828.