A magisterial, ambitious, and ground-breaking survey of its subject, this book is the sequel to Printing Colour, 1400–1700, edited by Ad Stijnman and Elizabeth Savage, published in 2015. The new volume has necessarily a wider scope, addressing the various advances in printmaking and print publishing in this later period but also examining the application of color printing to products such as wallpaper, calico, and ceramics, consumer products generally not otherwise considered in traditional print scholarship. The emphasis throughout is on the means of printing color, with less attention to aesthetics, but it is clear from the twenty-eight essays here that color was to prove transformative in many applications of printing—notably in science (botany, anatomy), in decoration (book wrappers, wallpaper, designs for the decorative arts), in the reproduction of drawings and paintings, in illustration, and in commercial and promotional material. With plentiful judiciously chosen plates, the book is sumptuously illustrated and includes a valuable selection of details and magnifications to illuminate aspects of process, such as embossing, the fine dots of stipple engraving, the subtleties of à la poupée inking, or the physical character of pigment deposited by a wood block.
Jason Whittaker’s Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness is an important contribution to our understanding of Blake’s afterlife in the arts. In his first chapter, titled “And Did Those Feet?,” Whittaker considers the text of the lyric now known as “Jerusalem,” although Blake never gave it that title. As part of his discussion of the opening two lines of the poem—“And did those feet in ancient time. / Walk upon Englands mountains green:”—he finds that there are no written sources prior to Blake’s composition of the lyric to support the contention that the “feet” belong to Jesus. He does find ample textual precedent, however, for the belief that Jesus’s disciple Joseph of Arimathea visited Britain (36-39). Whittaker concludes: “Turning to the stanzas themselves, as noted above the opening lines are usually interpreted as a reference to Christ in England, but, as we have already seen, it is improbable—if not impossible—that Blake knew of that legend, as it was a later invention. Instead, the feet referred to are those of Joseph of Arimathea” (45). I believe that this interpretation is wrong and that the usual reading of the opening lines is correct.
In the autumn of 1803, William and Catherine Blake returned to London from their three-year sojourn in a cottage in the coastal village of Felpham, Sussex. After an initial stay with Blake’s brother James at 28 Broad Street, and certainly by November, they had moved into a studio-residence at 17 South Molton Street, a street branching diagonally off the southern side of the northern end of Oxford Street. The new lodgings set them at the heart of art and art patronage in Regency London. From South Molton Street they were within easy walking distance of numerous galleries, as well as artists’ studios, shops, and collections. While Alexander Gilchrist describes the street during this period as “dingy, gardenless,” the Blakes had chosen a residence at the very center of London.
The annual William Blake checklist aims to record new editions, facsimiles, reproductions, translations, bibliographies, biographies, scholarship, and significant digital discussions from the last year. It is only through the kind assistance of collaborators that this bibliography is able to list these sources from multiple languages and to truly convey the global impact of Blake and his circle.
