NEWSLETTER
TATE BLAKE EXHIBITION
The Blake exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, is scheduled to open 9 March 1978 and to close 21 May. There will be a large fully illustrated catalogue comprising the (approximately) 340 works on exhibit, among them the following: examples of Blake’s work for Basire; all five versions of “Pestilence” (c. 1779-1805), together with “Pestilence—the death of the first born” from Boston; three versions of “The Ancient of Days” to show variations in coloring; three of the touched proofs of the title-page of Europe, including the newly discovered example from the Pierpont Morgan Library; an unpublished watercolor of a serpent; several rare
engravings, including both states of the large, early Job engraving, the little known first state of the Laocoön engraving (see Bindman, Blake 39), the unique engraving of “Death’s Door,” the monochrome engraving of “Lucifer and the Pope in Hell,” and both states of “Mirth”; examples of all twelve compositions from the series of large color prints of 1795 together with the preliminary drawings and small print of “Pity” and all the known versions of “God judging Adam”; illustrations from Young’s Night Thoughts and Gray’s Poems; examples of the Biblical illustrations for Butts, both in tempera and watercolor, including all four of the related watercolors showing the Beasts of the Apocalypse; examples from the Butts and Linnell series of Job illustrations; four of the tempera paintings from Blake’s exhibition of 1809 and an unpublished hand-colored copy of the Canterbury Pilgrims engraving; a good selection of Blake’s illustrations to Milton, including all but one of the large 1808 Paradise Lost series, the three late versions (1822) of the same series, the later Comus series and the complete L’Allegro and Il Penseroso; “Churchyard Spectres frightening a Schoolboy” (sic); examples of the Visionary Heads; the Virgil woodcuts together with two drawings; a selection of late tempera paintings, including the Arlington Court picture; and nineteen of the Dante watercolors, including eleven from the National Gallery of Victoria. Blake’s illuminated books are represented by a selection of individual pages from the books themselves and by examples of the separately issued color prints from the Small and Large Books of Designs.