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Lot Essay
In this famous poem William Blake powerfully expressed his outrage at the routine exploitation of children in the eighteenth century, lambasting in particular what he saw as the moral complicity of the Church. The opening line, `A little black thing among the snow, Crying "weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe!’, painfully suggests both the suffering of the child, and his tender age, too young to annunciate ‘sweep, sweep’, the call of the chimney sweepers to advertise their presence. In tones of black, brown and grey, Blake evokes the bleakness of the scene, of the chimney sweeper, laden with a bag of soot, walking through a desolate street, in the sleet under leaden skies. The sparseness of the design and the rawness of the textured surfaces created by Blake’s technique of colour printing is almost contemporary in sensibility, suggestive of Art Brut and Jean Dubuffet.
This exceptionally rare impression of The Chimney Sweeper is from the very first issue of William Blake’s Songs of Experience (circa 1794), a collection of seventeen poems richly illustrated, etched and printed by Blake himself. Blake printed only four separate copies of Experience (the First Issue), before combining it after 1794 with his earlier collection of poems, Songs of Innocence (1789).
This impression comes from the only First Issue copy of Experience, designated by scholars as Copy G, to have been disbound then dispersed in the nineteenth century. It is one of ten plates partially re-assembled by the renowned Blake scholar and collector Sir Geoffrey Keynes in the early twentieth century ‘from various sources at various times’ (Keynes, 1964, p. 56), eight of which are being sold here (see lots 148-155).
The remaining three First Issue copies of Experience are collated and largely extant: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (Copy F, complete); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (Copy T1, lacking this plate, part of a composite set of Songs); and Private Collection (Copy H, complete; formerly collection of Maurice Sendak, sold his sale, Christie’s New York, 10 June 2025, lot 30, for $1,865,000). Later impressions printed by Blake after 1794 are also largely accounted for, within complete or partial sets, the majority in public collections. With the missing impression of this plate from the set now in the National Gallery of Canada untraced (Copy T1), this is the only remaining available impression in private hands from its earliest colour printed iteration. To our knowledge no other impression of The Chimney Sweeper has been offered in at least forty years.
For a more comprehensive description of Songs of Experience and William Blake’s radical ‘Illuminated Printing’ method of which this impression of The Chimney Sweeper is an example, please see the catalogue note for Lot 148, The Tyger.
This exceptionally rare impression of The Chimney Sweeper is from the very first issue of William Blake’s Songs of Experience (circa 1794), a collection of seventeen poems richly illustrated, etched and printed by Blake himself. Blake printed only four separate copies of Experience (the First Issue), before combining it after 1794 with his earlier collection of poems, Songs of Innocence (1789).
This impression comes from the only First Issue copy of Experience, designated by scholars as Copy G, to have been disbound then dispersed in the nineteenth century. It is one of ten plates partially re-assembled by the renowned Blake scholar and collector Sir Geoffrey Keynes in the early twentieth century ‘from various sources at various times’ (Keynes, 1964, p. 56), eight of which are being sold here (see lots 148-155).
The remaining three First Issue copies of Experience are collated and largely extant: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (Copy F, complete); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (Copy T1, lacking this plate, part of a composite set of Songs); and Private Collection (Copy H, complete; formerly collection of Maurice Sendak, sold his sale, Christie’s New York, 10 June 2025, lot 30, for $1,865,000). Later impressions printed by Blake after 1794 are also largely accounted for, within complete or partial sets, the majority in public collections. With the missing impression of this plate from the set now in the National Gallery of Canada untraced (Copy T1), this is the only remaining available impression in private hands from its earliest colour printed iteration. To our knowledge no other impression of The Chimney Sweeper has been offered in at least forty years.
For a more comprehensive description of Songs of Experience and William Blake’s radical ‘Illuminated Printing’ method of which this impression of The Chimney Sweeper is an example, please see the catalogue note for Lot 148, The Tyger.