27 June 2002

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of Blake's twelve water-color illustrations to John Milton's poems "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. These splendid designs are published in our new Preview mode, one that provides all the features of the Archive except Image Search and Inote (our image annotation program). Each design is accompanied by a manuscript leaf that includes a quotation of the lines illustrated and brief interpretive comments by Blake. These manuscript leaves are also reproduced here in sequence following each design.

Produced for Blake's chief patron, Thomas Butts, c. 1816-20, the "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" illustrations exhibit the delicacy and refinement typical of Blake's late water-color style. Milton's contrasting companion poems gave Blake yet another opportunity to explore his own sense of contrariety, much as he did earlier in his career in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Through the careful selection of passages to illustrate, Blake also emphasizes the visionary and transformative moments in Milton's poems.

At present the Archive contains 45 copies of 18 of Blake's 19 illuminated books (all fully searchable); the Thomas Butts set of Blake's water colors illustrating the Book of Job, also in the Pierpont Morgan Library; and now the first of several series of Milton illustrations that we will be adding in Preview. In the near future we expect to release more drawings and prints in Preview, a much-anticipated electronic edition of Jerusalem copy E, and further supplementary materials, including a biography and glossary.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible through the continuing support of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, by a major grant from the Preservation and Access Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and by the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Andrea Laue, technical editors
The William Blake Archive

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