Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/325

 fresco, one of the most important of the culminating productions of Blake's life. One would give a good deal to have a similar sort of explanation by Orcagna, Michael Angelo, or Rubens, of the Last Judgment, as conceived and painted by those painters respectively; and none of them certainly was more capable of conceiving the subject than Blake, whatever may be the connoisseur's verdict as to the relative powers for executing it. How close, in many respects, the affinity of treatment, of framework and detail of incident, in all these paintings: yet how immense the divergence of the feeling, of the minds embodied in the works, of the aspects under which the subject, the Dies illa presented itself within the inner precincts of the painters' intellects! As regards the visionary or speculative portion of the paper referred to, a remarkable resemblance to Swedenborg may be observed in it here and there, as in the 'Doctrine of Correspondences' which it implies—the principle that spiritual conditions are represented by material objects, properties, and events. With these few remarks, we refer the reader to the paper itself.

Ozias Humphrey, a miniature painter of rare excellence, whose works have a peculiar sweetness of painting and refined simplicity in a now old-fashioned style, was himself a patron as well as friend, for whom Blake had expressly coloured many of his illustrated books. Humphrey had passed three years of his life, 1785—88, in India, and had reaped a golden harvest in Oude by painting miniatures of the native princes. What has become of these, I wonder } 1858 may have brought some of them across seas as the work of native artists! His sketches and note-books during that period are in the British Museum. When, in 1790, his sight first became imperfect, he took to crayons and oils with ill success. His eyes failed him altogether in 1799, after which he lived at Knightsbridge.

At the Academy's Exhibition in Somerset House for 1808, Blake, after nine years' intermission, exhibited two works, hung, as usual, in the Drawing and Miniature Room. Both