News
Monday 4 April 2005
William Blake engravings reveal hidden secret
A Nottingham Trent University PhD student , Dr Mei-Ying Sung, has uncovered a secret of one of Britain’s most highly regarded poets and artists, William Blake, author of the ‘Jerusalem’ hymn. For whilst Blake claimed to be a master engraver, his copper plate engravings showed that he used a little known technique called “repoussage” to hide his many mistakes.
The ‘art’ of repoussage has been around since the Bronze Age but its practice has almost died out today. Blake used the method to rectify his errors, knocking up the copper plate from the back. No one would be aware of what he had done because all they would see were the completed prints and not the plates themselves – hence the ‘deception’ continued!
Dr Sung has studied some of Blake’s most famous engravings, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Book of Job. There are 38 of William Blake’s copper plate engravings still in existence and she has seen them all as part of her research. They all show the use of repoussage to some extent.
She said: “It’s been a fascinating journey. No one has explored Blake’s copper plate engravings in such detail before, so my research challenges what experts have believed for the last 180 years or so.”
To help support her studies Dr Sung received a grant from the prestigious Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, which allowed her to travel to America to see some of the engravings in storage.
William Blake expert, Dr David Worrall, who is also from Nottingham Trent University added: “Blake likened himself to some of the UK’s most famous engravers such as Strange and Woollett, and indeed his reputation for his copper plate engravings remained untarnished, until now!
“He once said ‘every line is the line of beauty, it is only fumble and bungle which cannot draw a line.’ Yet, now it seems, he ‘fumbled and bungled’ with the best of them as this research shows.”
ENDS
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