QUERY
Gates of Paradise and Quarles’ Emblems
While I was doing some research for an article on For Children: The Gates of Paradise,1↤ 1 This essay is shortly to be published in the Städel Jahrbuch, N.F. Bd. V, hrsgb. Klaus Gallwitz & Herbert Beck, Munchen 1975. I examined the numerous editions of Francis Quarles’ Emblemes (first published 1635). I also came across the last “regular” reprint of Quarles’ epigrams, a book produced in 1839 and furnished with totally new emblem-icons, the woodcuts done by Charles H. Bennett and W. Harry Rogers. Blake drew massively on the original illustrations in Quarles’ collection of emblems when making his designs for GP in the Notebook, and in turn the latter artists, it appears to me, must have known and used Blake’s inventions when engraving their designs.2↤ 2 Cf. Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Francis Quarles, vol. III, N.Y. 1967 (reprint of 1880/1881 ed.), pp. 103 ff. Cf. especially for GP 10: Bk. III, emblem viii (p. 146); for GP 6: Bk. III, emblem xii (p. 150) and Bk. V, emblem xiii (p. 181), and for GP 14: Bk. IV, emblem ii (p. 155). There are some other striking iconographic parallels with Blake’s emblem-designs in the Notebook, GP and some of the illuminated books. Does anybody have some information on Bennett and Rogers, or some idea where they might have seen works of Blake (especially GP), etc.?
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