Newsletter
Morgan Library’s New Blakes
The Times Literary Supplement recently printed an article by Thomas V. Lange, Assistant Curator of Printed Books at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, and[e] Charles Ryskamp, Director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, describing a new purchase from “a Continental library” of a “specially bound life of Blake from the 1830 edition of Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters by Allan Cunningham,” and perhaps copied by Cunningham. The volume was extra-illustrated with a number of impressions of Blake’s engravings and etchings and two letters, one by John Varley to Cunningham, the other from Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, to Cunningham. Heretofore unrecorded impressions from the illuminated books include Jerusalem 2, 41, 59 and America 12, 13, 14, all posthumous impressions pulled by Tatham; contemporary impressions include Europe ii, 3, 4, Book of Los 5, and Jerusalem 28, 70, 75, some with differences from the “published” states, some with changes apparently by Blake. There are a number of Blake’s book illustrations, an “unexplained variant” of Blake’s illustration for the article on gem engraving for Rees’ Cyclopedia, and impressions of
