Robert Blair, The Grave

In October 1805, Blake was commissioned by the engraver and would-be publisher Robert H. Cromek to prepare forty drawings illustrating Robert Blair's The Grave, a popular "Graveyard" school poem first published in 1743. Cromek planned to select twenty of these designs for a de luxe edition of the poem. In Cromek's first prospectus of November 1805, Blake is named as both the designer and engraver of fifteen designs. Blake etched one image, Deaths Door, in white-line, but Cromek rejected it. The dark power of the white-line print appeals to modern tastes, but was far from fashionable in the early nineteenth century. In a second prospectus, also of November 1805, Cromek announced that Luigi (or Louis) Schiavonetti would engrave twelve designs for the new edition. Blake had lost the potentially lucrative commission to engrave his own designs; his relationship with Cromek descended into anger and argument. In spite of their disagreement, Cromek included a portrait of Blake as a frontispiece to the volume, published in 1808. Cromek promoted the book aggressively and the illustrations to The Grave became Blake's best known work through much of the nineteenth century.

The published volume includes Blake's dedicatory poem "To the Queen," a prefatory comment on the designs by Henry Fuseli, and a concluding section "Of the Designs" (unsigned, but probably by Benjamin Heath Malkin). The last presents an alternative arrangement of the plates independent of the textual sequence of lines illustrated. A second edition was published by Rudolph Ackermann in 1813; he also reprinted the plates, with inscribed titles in Spanish, in Jose Joaquin de Mora's Meditaciones Poeticas (1826), a series of poems written in response to Blake's designs. Nineteen of the finished water-color preliminary drawings for The Grave were rediscovered in 2001, as noted for each in the list of "Related Works," below. For this group, see "Illustrations to Robert Blair's The Grave" under Water Color Drawings in the main table of "Works in the William Blake Archive."

Blake's designs illustrate both major incidences in the poem and brief passages. His selection of subjects and themes emphasizes immortality more than the death, the latter often presented as a passage to the former. Although Cromek very probably made the final selection of designs to publish, they tend to fall into contrastive pairs in format and theme--e.g., death of the wicked man/death of the good man, parting of the soul and body/reunion of the soul and body.