19 November 2003

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of the electronic edition of Blake's illustrations to Robert Blair's The Grave, accompanied by the related separate plate of Deaths Door. Both are presented in our Preview mode, one that provides all the features of the Archive except Image Search and Inote (our image annotation program).

The illustrations to The Grave are among Blake's most important commissions for commercially published book illustrations. The engraver and would-be publisher R. H. Cromek hired Blake to illustrate Blair's popular "Graveyard" poem in 1805. Blake produced one design, Deaths Door, as a white-line etching, but Cromek found this so unsatisfactory that he quickly turned to the fashionable engraver Louis Schiavonetti to etch and engrave twelve of Blake's illustrations. These were published, along with a frontispiece portrait of Blake included in our electronic edition, in 1808. Blake's reputation as an artist through the first half of the nineteenth century was based largely on these images.

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 Library of Congress, 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
Andrea Laue, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

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