Europe a Prophecy

Poet, painter, and printmaker, William Blake was born in London to a family of modest means and received no formal artistic training beyond an apprenticeship to an engraver. From childhood he claimed visionary experiences — angels in trees, prophets in the fields — that would shape a body of work unlike anything else in English letters. Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Blake developed a unique method of "illuminated printing," fusing text and image on hand-colored plates, through which he issued his own mythology in works such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Europe A Prophecy, his searing meditation on revolution, tyranny, and the sleep of reason across a war-torn continent. Fiercely independent, radical in politics and theology alike, Blake died in poverty but left a visionary legacy that would only be fully understood by later generations.