William Blake London 1757 - 1827

Death’s Door is an iconic image, appearing and reappearing in Blake’s work throughout his career.  In what is perhaps the earliest example, from his notebook (N71), Blake depicts a bent old man going through an open door. Although the surrounding text appears to be unrelated, the small image is clearly labeled Deaths Door.  Although tiny, all the major elements are there:  the heavy stone door frame, the crutch, the windblown hair. 

This same figure reappears in For the Children:  The Gates of Paradise and America, both of 1793, but it is in the design for The Grave that Blake completes the composition by adding the nude figure of the youth above.¹   In doing so, he transforms the message of Blair’s poem from that of death as an ending to death as a moment of transition

 Tis but a night, a long moonless night;
We make the grave our bed, and then are gone! (p.32)

The commentator in 'Of the Designs' describes the composition as:

The door opening, that seems to make utter darkness visible; age, on crutches, hurried by a tempest into it.  Above is the renovated man seated in light and glory.'

The 'renovated man,' the resurrected soul, radiates light; it blazes from him as star-shaped corona.  If there were any doubt about the meaning of this figure, one need only look back to America plate 8  (fig. 15) in which a very similar nude man sits on an actual grave, a skull resting beyond his right hand.²  Just below the figure are Blake’s powerful verses:

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 cov’ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry’d.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds are burst:

The fusion of the two designs into Death’s Door becomes a central image in Blake’s interpretation (or perhaps revision) of Blair’s poem.  It was also the only design Blake etched himself.  The white-line etching of Death’s Door (fig. 2) repeats in reverse all the elements of the watercolor apart from the flowers growing to the right of the door, replaced in the etching by a thorny vine on the left and some spiky vegetation on the right.  It is generally thought that this was a sample print that Blake gave to Cromek and which horrified the publisher so much he hired Schiavonetti as his engraver.  Certainly this idiosyncratic work has little in common with conventional book illustration of the period.  But in comparison to Schiavonetti’s print (fig. 3), Blake’s etching is filled with power and emotion. The very use of white line against the black background lends the work a kind of shimmering radiance that accords with Blake’s idea of transformation and transcendence.

The watercolor itself radiates light.  Blake uses the reserve of the paper, accented with bright strokes of yellow,  to create the aura around the seated figure; much of the rest of the sheet is also left uncolored.  The nude figure of the youth is accented in the very palest pink.  The blue tones that dominate many of the other subjects is here confined mainly to the robes of the old man. 

¹There are two drawings,  a pencil sketch  formerly in the Shields collection but now lost, and a pencil drawing reworked by another hand, in the Carnegie Museum, that predate the watercolor for The Grave.   See Essick and Paley, Op.cit.¸p 219.

²The figure of the rising youth first appears in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell of 1790.