Illustrations to Robert Blair's "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 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.

We present here the twenty water-color illustrations originally selected by Cromek for publication. These were sold at an auction in Edinburgh in 1836, but were unknown until the dramatic rediscovery of nineteen of the water colors in 2001. These were sold individually at auction in May 2006 and are now widely dispersed; most are now in private collections. For details about provenance and current ownership, see the Work Information page.

One design originally part of the group, as indicated by the size and style of its backing mat, became detached from its companions, probably in the mid-nineteenth century. This work, The Widow Embracing her Husband's Grave (Yale Center for British Art, Butlin 633), has been included here. The designs are arranged according to the sequence of passages illustrated, with those designs not based on any specific passage in Blair's poem grouped at the end.

Schiavonetti's engravings published in Cromek's 1808 edition of The Grave and the white-line etching of "Deaths Door" are also available in the Archive (see Commercial Book Illustrations, and Separate Prints and Prints in Series, in the main table of "Works in the William Blake Archive").