18 December 2003

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of Blake's illustrations to two of John Milton's poems, the ode "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" and Paradise Regained. 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). These two sets of water colors join the twelve illustrations to Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" previously published. They can be found in the Archive by moving through the following categories: Works in the Archive, Non-Illuminated Materials, Drawings and Paintings, and Water Color Drawings.

The six illustrations to the "Nativity Ode" presented here are the set commissioned by the Rev. Joseph Thomas in 1809. These are now in the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester; a second set, acquired by Thomas Butts c. 1815, is in the Huntington Library. This later set will be published in the Archive next year. The twelve illustrations to Paradise Regained may have been commissioned by Butts c. 1816-20, but were acquired directly from Blake by John Linnell in 1825. Both series show Blake's close reading of Milton's poetry, but a stylistic comparison between them reveals Blake's development as a water colorist from relatively broad, flat washes, typical of his work in the first decade of the nineteenth century, to his mature style characterized by detailed modeling and stipple-like brushwork.

We are also pleased to announce that the Archive is this year's recipient of the Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition, awarded every two years by the Modern Language Association. This is the first time that the award has been given to an electronic edition.

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