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Lot Essay
This watercolour and the following lot are the designs Blake produced for Robert Cromek’s illustrated edition of Robert Blair’s The Grave. In September 1805, Cromek, an engraver turned publisher, commissioned Blake to provide the illustrations for an imperial quarto deluxe edition of the poem. The project was financed by advanced subscriptions, but the details of the exact scope of Blake’s illustrations is somewhat confused. John Flaxman noted a set of 40 drawings, from which 20 would be engraved by Blake, whereas in Blake’s correspondence he refers to ‘about twenty’ and then to a prospectus. Two prospectuses are in fact known, one referring to fifteen illustrations, to be drawn and engraved by Blake (see fig. 1), and the second (slightly later) to twelve illustrations, designed by Blake but engraved by Louis Schiavonetti.
This change to the plan has been widely regarded as a betrayal of Blake by Cromek in favour of the more conventional Schiavonetti, and certainly, the relationship between the two men never recovered. The Grave was finally published in July 1808, with over 500 advance subscribers. It was modestly successful at first, but a new issue in 1813 (fig. 2) led to a continued growth in its reputation. By the mid nineteenth-century Blake’s illustrations to The Grave were probably his best-known works.
The group of drawings Blake made for Cromek were thought lost for many years – they were sold at the auction of the collection of Thomas Sivright at C.B. Tait in Edinburgh on 10 February 1836, listed rather vaguely as ‘Volume of Drawings by Blake, Illustrative of Blair’s Grave, entitled “Black Spirits and White, Blue Spirits and Grey”.’ The buyer was not listed, and all record was then lost, until nineteen appeared with a second-hand bookshop in Glasgow, Scotland in spring 2001, having been acquired from a descendant of the artist John Stannard.
The Soul Hovering over the Body Reluctantly Parting with Life exemplifies the way in which Blake and Cromek interpreted Blair’s poem differently. Cromek placed the illustration opposite a dramatic passage describing the soul as ‘frantic’ as she ‘raves around the walls’ and ‘shrieks for help’ at the moment of death. Blake, who in contrast saw death as a transition rather than a permanent ending, chose to depict the last lines of the passage, in which the soul is reconciled to the parting:
How wishfully she looks
On all she’s leaving, now no longer her’s!
A little longer, yet a little longer,
O might she stay to wash away her stains,
And fit her for her passage!
The male figure of the body is unequivocally dead, depicted lying on a bier with a stony, almost sculptural quality, but this was not Blake’s initial idea. A sketch for the composition, now at Tate Britain, shows the body as a sleeping figure, lying on his side, naked, with a laurel wreath on his head (fig. 3). The figure of the soul hovering above is very similar to that in the final drawing, looking down with her hands raised to either side of her face. The sketch takes the idea of death as transitional or temporary further than the final design.
The bodily representation of the soul in the same composition as the body was controversial at the time of publishing, with a reviewer in Soho Magazine in November 1808 writing, ‘There is just one circumstance, which runs through many of these pieces, which we cannot quite go along with; this is the representation of the soul in a bodily form. Such an idea we think is greatly too bold…. It would even have been tolerable had the soul been introduced by itself without its bodily companion…’ (reprinted in D. Groves, ‘Blake, The Grave and Edinburgh Literary Society’ in Blake: An illustrated Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 1, summer 1990, p. 250). As the poem progresses, Blake presents body and soul increasingly as separated lovers, until the climactic moment of their reunion at the very end of the poem in The Reunion of the Soul and the Body (fig. 4, sold Christie’s, New York, 5 February 2026). Here he presents that idea delicately, as the soul looks down tenderly on her separated body.
This change to the plan has been widely regarded as a betrayal of Blake by Cromek in favour of the more conventional Schiavonetti, and certainly, the relationship between the two men never recovered. The Grave was finally published in July 1808, with over 500 advance subscribers. It was modestly successful at first, but a new issue in 1813 (fig. 2) led to a continued growth in its reputation. By the mid nineteenth-century Blake’s illustrations to The Grave were probably his best-known works.
The group of drawings Blake made for Cromek were thought lost for many years – they were sold at the auction of the collection of Thomas Sivright at C.B. Tait in Edinburgh on 10 February 1836, listed rather vaguely as ‘Volume of Drawings by Blake, Illustrative of Blair’s Grave, entitled “Black Spirits and White, Blue Spirits and Grey”.’ The buyer was not listed, and all record was then lost, until nineteen appeared with a second-hand bookshop in Glasgow, Scotland in spring 2001, having been acquired from a descendant of the artist John Stannard.
The Soul Hovering over the Body Reluctantly Parting with Life exemplifies the way in which Blake and Cromek interpreted Blair’s poem differently. Cromek placed the illustration opposite a dramatic passage describing the soul as ‘frantic’ as she ‘raves around the walls’ and ‘shrieks for help’ at the moment of death. Blake, who in contrast saw death as a transition rather than a permanent ending, chose to depict the last lines of the passage, in which the soul is reconciled to the parting:
How wishfully she looks
On all she’s leaving, now no longer her’s!
A little longer, yet a little longer,
O might she stay to wash away her stains,
And fit her for her passage!
The male figure of the body is unequivocally dead, depicted lying on a bier with a stony, almost sculptural quality, but this was not Blake’s initial idea. A sketch for the composition, now at Tate Britain, shows the body as a sleeping figure, lying on his side, naked, with a laurel wreath on his head (fig. 3). The figure of the soul hovering above is very similar to that in the final drawing, looking down with her hands raised to either side of her face. The sketch takes the idea of death as transitional or temporary further than the final design.
The bodily representation of the soul in the same composition as the body was controversial at the time of publishing, with a reviewer in Soho Magazine in November 1808 writing, ‘There is just one circumstance, which runs through many of these pieces, which we cannot quite go along with; this is the representation of the soul in a bodily form. Such an idea we think is greatly too bold…. It would even have been tolerable had the soul been introduced by itself without its bodily companion…’ (reprinted in D. Groves, ‘Blake, The Grave and Edinburgh Literary Society’ in Blake: An illustrated Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 1, summer 1990, p. 250). As the poem progresses, Blake presents body and soul increasingly as separated lovers, until the climactic moment of their reunion at the very end of the poem in The Reunion of the Soul and the Body (fig. 4, sold Christie’s, New York, 5 February 2026). Here he presents that idea delicately, as the soul looks down tenderly on her separated body.