Blake, William | Likely the finest known posthumous printing of "Songs of Innocence and of Experience"

Blake, William

Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. [London:] The Author & Printer W Blake, 1789, 1794 [Printed by Frederick Tatham, ca. 1831–1832]

55 relief-etched plates on 55 leaves, etched by William Blake and printed by Frederick Tatham in brilliant sepia on heavy Whatman wove paper (200 x 158 mm or smaller, a number of leaves retaining deckle on lower and fore-edges; watermarked J Whatman | 1831), framing the plates with generous margins, the plates neatly numbered in pencil 0, 1–54. Early twentieth-century red morocco by Riviere & Son (stamp-signed on verso of front free-endpaper), covers with single black-ruled border and five black-stamped faux ties emenating from raised bands on the spine, spine gilt in six compartments, the second lettered, others with a gilt fleuron, yellow-coated endpapers, single plain flyleaf at front and back, top edge gilt, others uncut; extremities rubbed, spine darkened, small ink stain to lower cover, endpapers and flyleaves foxed.

Likely the finest known posthumous printing of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience—with early provenance although lost from sight for more than a century and unrecorded by Bentley or the WIlliam Blake Archive—and the only posthumous copy of the Songs complete with all 54 etchings and the additional plate "A Divine Image." The plates are here headed by "A Divine Image" and then follow in the order adopted by Blake late in life (including transferring five plates, 34–36, 53, 54, with the texts of four poems from Innocence to Experience). This order was subsequently followed by Bentley and is now standard:

b) “A Divine Image”

1) Combined title-page

2) Innocence frontispiece

3) Innocence title-page

4) “Introduction” (“Piping down the valleys wild”)

5) “The Shepherd”

6) “The Ecchoing Green”

7) “The Ecchoing Green,” pl. 2

8) “The Lamb”

9) “The Little Black Boy”

10) “The Little Black Boy,” pl. 2 

11) “The Blossom”

12) “The Chimney Sweeper”

13) “The Little Boy lost”

14) “The Little Boy found”

15) “Laughing Song”

16) “A Cradle Song”

17) “A Cradle Song,” pl. 2

18) “The Divine Image”

19) “Holy Thursday”

20) “Night”

21) “Night,” pl. 2

22) “Spring”

23) “Spring,” pl. 2

24) “Nurse’s Song”

25) “Infant Joy”

26) “A Dream”

27) “On Anothers Sorrow”

28) Experience frontispiece

29) Experience title-page

30) “Introduction” (“Hear the voice of the Bard!”)

31) “Earth’s Answer”

32) “The Clod & the Pebble”

33) “Holy Thursday”

34) “The Little Girl Lost”

35) “The Little Girl Lost,” pl. 2 / “The Little Girl Found

36) “The Little Girl Found,” pl. 2 

37) “The Chimney Sweeper”

38) “Nurses Song”

39) “The Sick Rose”

40) “The Fly”

41) “The Angel”

42) “The Tyger”

43) “My Pretty Rose Tree” / “Ah! Sun-Flower” / “The Lilly”

44) “The Garden of Love”

45) “The Little Vagabond”

46) “London” (similar, but reversed, figures of a bearded, stooped old man on crutches appear throughout Blake’s illuminated and engraved works, including America, 1793; Blair’s Grave, 1808 [see lot 1030 in Part 2]; and Job, 1826 [see lot 1031 in Part 2])

47) “The Human Abstract”

48) “Infant Sorrow”

49) “A Poison Tree”

50) “A Little Boy Lost”

51) “A Little Girl Lost”

52) “To Tirzah”

53) “The School Boy”

54) “The Voice of the Ancient Bard” 

Among the other known posthumous copies, only five are complete or near complete (copies a, b, c, f/j, and h), and all of these either lack a plate or do not include "A Divine Image," which is known in only one lifetime impression (copy BB) and in less than a dozen posthumous impressions.

Joseph Viscomi, in “Posthumous Blake: The Roles of Catherine Blake, C. H. Tatham, and Frederick Tatham in Blake’s Afterlife,” describes how following William Blake's death in 1827, Frederick Tatham (1805–1878), one of the young English artists known as the Shoreham Angels and a disciple of Blake, "cared for the widowed Catherine and came to possess all of Blake’s effects after she died in October 1831 … copperplates 'as well as all of [Blake’s] Works that remained unsold at [her] Death being writings, paintings.'"

Catherine Blake herself printed posthumous copies of her husband’s separate plates, using his rolling press while residing at John Linnell’s studio in 1827–1828. Beginning in 1828, when she began her association with the Tathams, she also printed full posthumous copies of the illuminated books America and Europe.

All ten or twelve posthumously printed Songs are on Whatman paper of two weights, watermarked either 1831 or 1832. Since Catherine died in October 1831, it is possible that she might have contributed to the printing of some of the posthumous Songs, but Viscomi does not believe this was the case—in large part because four plates (combined title-page, first plate of “The Little Black Boy,” Experience frontispiece, and Experience “Chimney Sweeper”) were very slightly reworked with a burin, which was a step she was unlikely to have taken.

Viscomi reduces the riot of ink colors described by Bentley and Keynes & Wolf in posthumous copies of Songs—grey, dark grey, black, brown, red, reddish-brown, yellowish-brown, orangish-brown, light brown, and sepia—to just black and sepia, attributing the chromatic range observed by his predecessors to “the quality and amount of pigment in the ink, the thinness of the ink layer, the type and condition of the paper when printed (damp or dry), the amount of pressure used to transfer the ink, and the kind and amount of oil in the ink.” He concludes that the first copies Tatham printed were in black and the later and “better” copies in sepia.

Apparently no copies of Songs were printed from Blake's original plates after 1832. Several changes in Tatham's circumstances might have contributed to the suspenion of their production—loss of the rolling press, financial difficulties, and, especially, his falling under the influence of the mystic Scots evangelist Edward Irving. A convincing case is made by Bentley that at some point while an Irvingite Tatham purposely destroyed a signficant number of Blake's drawing and manuscripts. The fate of the etched plates is a mystery; they may have been sold as scrap metal. "Frederick Tatham was devoted to William and Catherine Blake," Bentley concludes, "but the heritage of William Blake that passed into his hands was far greater than what survives today" (Stranger, p. 446). Still, Tatham has to be credited for producing at least some further copies of the illuminated books directly from Blake's own relief-etched plates. And among the "better" sepia copies of the Tatham-printed Songs of Innocence and of Experience that do survive, the present example can be considered the best.

REFERENCES:

G. E. Bentley Jr. Blake Books. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977

G. E. Bentley Jr. Blake Records: Documents (1714-1841) Concerning the Life of William Blake (1757-1827) and His Family. Second edition. New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2004

G. E. Bentley Jr. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2001

Geoffrey Keynes & Edwin Wolf 2^nd. William Blake’s Illuminated Books: A Census. New York: The Grolier Club, 1953

Joseph Viscomi. Blake and the Idea of the Book. Princeton University Press, 1993

Joseph Viscomi, “Posthumous Blake: The Roles of Catherine Blake, C. H. Tatham, and Frederick Tatham in Blake’s Afterlife,” in The Blake Quarterly, 53.2 (fall 2019)

PROVENANCE:

Isaac Faulkner Bird (1803-1884), likely acquired from Tatham shortly after its printing; presumably by bequest to his nephew — F. Faulkner White; sold, 12 February 1885, to — James George Commin (1857-1914), Exeter bookseller and alderman; presumably sold, before the end of the century, to — a private American collector; by family descent to — the present owner.

The foregoing summary of provenance is largely derived from an autograph letter signed by F. Faulkner White laid into the book, one page on White’s business letterhead (Accountant, Auctioneer & Appraiser, House & Estate Agent), Exeter, 26 July 1886, to J. G. Commin: “The copy of Blakes Songs of innocence & experience which I sold you at Cowper place, Leeds on 12th Feby 1885 was the property of my Uncle I. Faulkner Bird who was an intimate friend of the Blakes.” The artist Isaac Faulkner Bird is likely the “Mr Bird” who acquired a copy of Blake’s Job engravings from John Linnell on 17 December 1830 (Blake Records, pp. 793, 801), as well as the “Mr Bird” who was one of the six mourners at Catherine Blake’s funeral, 23 October 1831, according to Tatham’s Life of Blake (Blake Records, p. 691), when he was given copy F of Blake’s For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise by Tatham (Blake Books, pp. 202-03).