William Blake London 1757 - 1827

This watercolor does not appear to illustrate a specific verse, but speaks to the general concept of death as a leveler.  In the published version of The Grave the engraving based on this design appears opposite page 11, the beginning lines of which address that concept:

When self-esteem, or other’s adulation,
Would cunningly persuade us we were something
Above the common level of our kind,
The Grave gainsays the smooth-complexion’d flatt'ry,
And with blunt truth acquaints us what we are.

Executed in an almost monochromatic range of grays and green, Blake’s watercolor captures the absolute stillness of the tomb.  The composition is closely related to a drawing in pen and wash now in a private collection in Great Britain, which Butlin dates to c.1780-85 (fig. 17).¹  However, there the five figures are clearly corpses stretched out on a battlefield, while in the watercolor they are clearly within a tomb and, in fact, look more like medieval tomb sculptures than corpses.  Even the knight’s crossed legs suggest limbs modeled in stone rather than flesh. The figures are rigidly aligned, holding their identifying attributes – the counsellor’s scroll, the king’s scepter, the knight’s sword and the mother's child. The only real deviance from this hieratic approach is the mother, who is slightly off line, her head tilted to the child, and her features not quite so stony as the others’.

The inspiration for this representation dates to Blake’s early days as an apprentice to James Basire, the engraver.  Basire sent him to Westminster Abbey to copy the tombs and other carvings, and Blake apparently spent many happy months making drawings.   Some were later engraved and used in Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain, Part I, of 1786.  That Blake drew upon these images some twenty years later is not surprising given the subject he was illustrating and the fact that he seems never to have forgotten a motif.

This depiction of the dead as if they were tomb sculptures can be found in other watercolors in this series:  The Soul Hovering Over the Body (lot 7) and The Death of the Good Old Man (lot 14).  In all cases the bodies are draped and the contours are barely evident.  Their heads are generally on low pillows or a rolled mat.  In The Counseller even the coloring is suggestive of stone.  Perhaps turning the figures to stone was Blake’s way of eternalizing them as well as emphasizing the universal nature of death.

¹Butlin, vol. I, pp.  no. 136.