Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/42

— 42 — exhibition of his own works, which took place in 1809. Both in his Marginal Notes and in the descriptive Catalogue we find the most violent abuse of the Venetian and Flemish Schools, of the contemporary English school of landscape painters, fathered by Gainsborough and against the art of J. Reynolds himself. Blake found that the typical in art had a higher effect on the mind than the individual; this he sees in Raphael and Michael-Angelo, while in Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt he sees the individual, the form of the model who sat for the pictures. Further he accuses those painters of generalizing viz. of an arrangement of effects of colouring, texture and shadow so put together as to prevent a picture to present clearly its individual parts, limbs or features. This last fault he thinks no oil-painting escapes, hence his preference for water colours and drawings. Lastly he strongly objects to the colouring of those painters. The terms in which Blake puts forth these opinions are those of the most violent abuse and the grossest exaggeration.

Rubens is called an "outrageous demon", of his colouring Blake remarks that it is "most contemptible". "The shadows are of a filthy brown, somewhat of the colour of excrement" etc. (Descriptive Catalogue.) Sir Joshua Reynolds and his school are called "a gang of cunning hired knaves", and about his method of generalisation Blake remarks: "to generalize is to be an idiot. General knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess". (Descriptive Catalogue.) Elsewhere Gainsborough is compared to a blurring and blotting demon, and to the Venetian masters in general the terms of "journeymen" and "knaves" have been applied. Though personal taste of course can be the reason why Blake appreciated the art of Michael Angelo, Dürer, and Rafael more, yet it is an extraordinary instance of narrow-mindedness to reject altogether such painters as Rembrandt, Rubens, and Correggio. We can explain this hatred, however, when we compare with it the equally strong disapprobation Blake utters in the case of the philosophy of Bacon; the worship of nature of Swedenborg and Dante; and the empirical science represented to him by Newton. We find the following epitaph on Bacon: