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拍品專文
Unlike most of the drawings for The Grave, Death’s Door is a design and concept which appears multiple times in Blake’s work. The earliest example is in his notebook (fig. 1, now in the British Library, p. 73), where a bent old man is depicted walking through an open door, and the image is labelled Deaths Door. The door, similar to the present drawing, has a heavy stone frame, and the figure leans on a crutch with his hair blowing. The figure is seen again in For the Children: The Gates of Paradise and America (see fig. 2), both executed in 1793, however, in the design for The Grave Blake completes the composition by adding the figure of the youth seated above the door.
Here again we see Blake’s interpretation of death as a moment of transition rather than an ending. Blair’s words here are:
Tis but a night, a long moonless night;
We make the grave our bed, and then are gone!
In contrast to the finite and somewhat bleak words, Blake’s seated youth radiates light – he is the resurrected soul of the old man making his way through the door, demonstrating the temporality of death. A very similar figure of a youth also appears in America, seated on a grave with a skull beside him, alongside the words:
The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
The bones of death, the cow’ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry’d.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds are burst
Death’s Door was the only design which Blake etched himself (fig. 3). The white-line etching perfectly echoes, in reverse, the watercolour, apart from in the exchange of the flowers to the right of the door for a thorny vine and spiky vegetation. It has generally been thought that this was the sample print which Blake gave to Cromek and which caused such consternation that Schiavonetti was hired as the engraver. Certainly, Blake’s engraving is a long way from conventional book illustrations of the period, but it is filled with a power and emotion entirely lacking from Schiavonetti’s rendering (fig. 4).
Here again we see Blake’s interpretation of death as a moment of transition rather than an ending. Blair’s words here are:
Tis but a night, a long moonless night;
We make the grave our bed, and then are gone!
In contrast to the finite and somewhat bleak words, Blake’s seated youth radiates light – he is the resurrected soul of the old man making his way through the door, demonstrating the temporality of death. A very similar figure of a youth also appears in America, seated on a grave with a skull beside him, alongside the words:
The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
The bones of death, the cow’ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry’d.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds are burst
Death’s Door was the only design which Blake etched himself (fig. 3). The white-line etching perfectly echoes, in reverse, the watercolour, apart from in the exchange of the flowers to the right of the door for a thorny vine and spiky vegetation. It has generally been thought that this was the sample print which Blake gave to Cromek and which caused such consternation that Schiavonetti was hired as the engraver. Certainly, Blake’s engraving is a long way from conventional book illustrations of the period, but it is filled with a power and emotion entirely lacking from Schiavonetti’s rendering (fig. 4).