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拍品專文
Robert Essick has suggested a possible connection with Robert Blair's The Grave, pp. 3-4 of the 1808 edition (letter to M. Butlin, see M. Butlin, op.cit., no. 342, 3 March 1975), but there is no justification in the text for the figure in the doorway on the right, who looks like a schoolmaster holding a birch, and the boy is holding a doll rather than a satchel. The style of the watercolour, which is only half finished, suggests a date in the later 1790s, some five years or more before Blake again became actively concerned with illustrating The Grave.
In a way this drawing can be seen as a light-hearted complement to the larger and more finished watercolour of Malevolence (Butlin, loc.cit., no. 341, illustrated in colour vol. II, pl. 345), painted in 1799 for the Rev. Dr. Trusler of Englefield Green, but rejected. Both works, perhaps significantly, finished up in the collection of Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist, widow of Blake's first biographer; her name is given as the owner of both works in William Michael Rossetti's list catalogue in the 1863 edition of Gilchrist's Life.
In a way this drawing can be seen as a light-hearted complement to the larger and more finished watercolour of Malevolence (Butlin, loc.cit., no. 341, illustrated in colour vol. II, pl. 345), painted in 1799 for the Rev. Dr. Trusler of Englefield Green, but rejected. Both works, perhaps significantly, finished up in the collection of Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist, widow of Blake's first biographer; her name is given as the owner of both works in William Michael Rossetti's list catalogue in the 1863 edition of Gilchrist's Life.