The Large Color Printed Drawings of 1795 and c. 1805

Blake's twelve large color prints, first designed and executed in 1795, are often considered to be his greatest works as a pictorial artist. Both their sublime imagery and the printmaking technique Blake used to create them evolved out of his illuminated books of 1790-95. Although at least one of the prints, God Judging Adam, shows evidence of having been printed from a copperplate etched in relief, the other subjects were probably printed planographically from unetched copperplates or millboards (a thick cardboard). Blake probably drew an outline of the design on the printing matrix, painted on it areas of gum- or glue-based pigments, and then printed individual impressions on damp paper in his rolling press. No more than three impressions of any one of the twelve designs are extant. After printing, each impression was worked up with pen and ink outlining and water colors. At least two of the designs, Nebuchadnezzar and Newton in the Tate Collection (Butlin 301, 306), were reprinted c. 1805. It is also possible that, c. 1805, Blake added more hand outlining and tinting to some impressions printed in 1795.

Modern scholars have interpreted the connections among the designs and their iconography, but no interpretation has become definitive. It seems as though the twelve subjects are not a series with a fixed sequence, but rather a group of designs centered upon images of the fallen world. Within that general group are a few companion prints, such as Elohim Creating Adam and Satan Exulting over Eve, associated in subject, design, or both. The textual sources for the images range from the Bible to Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake's own poetic mythologies of the mid-1790s.

The color printed drawings are now widely dispersed. By far the largest collection, one that includes eleven of the twelve designs, is in the Tate Collection. The selection presented here includes at least one impression of each design. Ten prints are drawn from the Tate Collection, but also included here are works from the British Museum; the Collection of Robert N. Essick; the Fitzwilliam Museum; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; a private collection; the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the Yale Center for British Art.