Old Master Drawings
Old Master Drawings
Property from a Distinguished American Private Collection
William Blake
The Death of Ezekiel’s Wife
Auction Closed
January 27, 05:29 PM GMT
Estimate
80,000 - 120,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Property from a Distinguished American Private Collection
William Blake
London 1757 - 1827
The Death of Ezekiel’s Wife
Pen and black ink with black and grey washes over pencil, heightened with scratching out
339 by 477 mm; 13 3/8 by 18 5/8 in
Frederick Tatham (1805-1878);
his sale, London, Sotheby's, 29 April 1862, lot 164 (part of lot), bt. F.T. Palgrave,
Sir Frederick Turner Palgrave (1824-1897), by whom inscribed, verso,
by whom given as a wedding present to Mr and Mrs Henry Adams,
by inheritance to his niece Mrs Robert Homan, née Abigail Adams,
by inheritance to the present owner
A. Russell, The Engravings of William Blake, London, 1912, p. 69;
Ward Thoron, ed. The Letters of Mrs Henry Adams, 1865-83, Boston, 1936, p. 21;
E. Scheyer, 'Henry Adams as a Collector of Art', Art Quarterly, vol. XV, London, 1952, p. 224;
E. Scheyer, The Circle of Henry Adams: Art & Artists, Wayne State, 1970, p. 54;
G. Keynes, Engravings by William Blake, The Seperate Plates, London, 1956, pp. 23-4;
G. Keynes, William Blake's Illustrations to the Bible, London, 1957, p. 26, under no. 81;
M. Butlin, The Blake Collection of Mrs William T. Tonner', Bulletin, Philadelphia Museum of Art, vol. LXVII, 1972, p. 9;
B. Lindberg, William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job, 1973, pp. 76-7, 251-3;
M. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, New Haven, 1981, p. 63, no. 165, pl. 202
Dated to circa 1785 this bold drawing is connected to both a watercolor, now held in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (inv. no. 1964-110-11), and a line engraving which was published in October 1794.
By the middle of the 1780s Blake had begun creating work inspired by themes from the Old Testament. In the present work he focuses on the Prophet Ezekiel, Chapter 24, verses 15-18, the moment when, faced with the sudden death of his beloved wife, Ezekiel follows God’s command to neither weep nor mourn for the dead.
Blake shows the prophet as a boulder of strength, only his eyes - which glaze skywards – indicate the emotions that must rage within. This stoic pose is in sharp contrast to the grief-stricken gestures of the four other mourners in the composition.
This work has a very distinguished history. It passed from Blake’s wife, Catherine, to Frederick Tatham, one of Blake's disciples and a member of the Shoreham ‘Ancients.’ In the Sotheby’s sale of April 1862 it was sold within the same lot as Blake’s Job, his Wife and his Friends (Tate, Britain, inv. no. 5200) and The Complaint of Job (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, acc. no. 69.30.215).
The lot was bought by Sir Francis Turner Palgrave, the noted critic, anthologist and poet, who was also a son-in-law of the banker and art collector Dawson Turner. Palgrave presented the work to his friend, Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) on the occasion of his marriage to Marion ‘Clover’ Hooper Adams (1843-1885). A graduate of Harvard and the scion of America’s first political dynasty, Adams was a historian, aesthete and the son of Charles Francis Adams (1807-1886), who served as Abraham Lincoln’s Ambassador to Great Britain between 1861 and 1868 (during which time Henry served as his personal secretary in England). Together with his wife, Clover, who was an accomplished amateur photographer, in Washington, during the 1870s, the couple were at the core of an exclusive social circle known as the ‘Five of Hearts’, which also included Clarence Rivers King and John Milton Hay. The Adams’ owned other works by Blake, including the great Nebuchadnezzar (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, inv. 27.354). The present drawing has remained in the collections of their descendants and has not been presented for sale for 159 years.