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Lot Essay
A Little BOY Lost is a parable of the suppression of freedom of thought by religious authority. Although dissenters and free thinkers did not face penal punishments in the eighteenth century, they still faced social exclusion and prejudice. Blake contrasts the natural, enquiring mind of a child about the nature and limits of love, with the dogma-induced violence of the priest, who, in the name of this love, burns the little boy at the stake. Below the text the figures of the weeping parents, their heads bowed in grief, kneel before the burning pyre.
This exceptionally rare impression of A Little BOY Lost 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 reassembled by the renowned Blake scholar and collector Sir Geoffrey Keynes in the early 20th 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. To our knowledge no other impression of A Little BOY Lost has been offered in at least forty years, and this is the only impression from its earliest colour printed iteration that remains in private hands.
For a more comprehensive description of The Songs of Experience and William Blake’s radical ‘Illuminated Printing’ method of which this impression of A Little BOY Lost is an example, please see the catalogue note for Lot 148, The Tyger.
This exceptionally rare impression of A Little BOY Lost 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 reassembled by the renowned Blake scholar and collector Sir Geoffrey Keynes in the early 20th 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. To our knowledge no other impression of A Little BOY Lost has been offered in at least forty years, and this is the only impression from its earliest colour printed iteration that remains in private hands.
For a more comprehensive description of The Songs of Experience and William Blake’s radical ‘Illuminated Printing’ method of which this impression of A Little BOY Lost is an example, please see the catalogue note for Lot 148, The Tyger.