Where to See William Blake: The Ancient of Days, Newton and a Bloodthirsty Flea

A flea explained itself to William Blake. According to the account associated with his friend John Varley, these insects contained the souls of men so hungry for blood that larger bodies would make them a danger to the whole country. The resulting Ghost of a Flea, in Tate’s collection, is barely twenty-one centimetres high. Its appetite seems much larger. A tiny object can contain a whole account of human violence: that is a useful preparation for looking at Blake.

The most direct route through the works here connects Tate in London with the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Approach them as particular objects, rather than familiar images reproduced on book covers. Blake’s colour prints were worked by hand, and copies of his illustrated books can differ substantially. The version matters. So does scale: a figure that fills a screen may ask you to lean closer in a museum.

London: a monster small enough to hold

Varley, a painter and astrologer, encouraged Blake to draw the figures he said he saw in visions. The Ghost of a Flea belongs to that exchange. Its extended tongue and cup make the hunger visible. Tempera and gold on mahogany give the creature a material existence quite different from an airy apparition. Treat the story as Blake’s reported vision, not as a medical diagnosis or a supernatural event we can verify.

There is a dry comedy in giving an insect the body of a muscular actor. The monster appears capable of terrible things, yet its small support keeps bringing the viewer back to the ridiculous disproportion. Instead of deciding that Blake is simply strange, look at how carefully he makes a particular vice take bodily form.

The career behind these visions involved ordinary work. Engraving was Blake’s main income, often reproducing designs by other people. In 1809 he tried to reach a public through an exhibition at his brother’s premises in London; it drew little attention and a hostile review. The gap between the scale of his ambitions and the size of his audience helps explain why encountering the originals can feel so concentrated. These were ideas worked out without a dependable public waiting for them.

London: Newton looks down

A young, naked man bends over a geometrical diagram in Newton, also in Tate’s collection. His seat is a rough, growth-covered rock, apparently underwater. The body curves towards the compasses until attention seems to have become posture. Blake opposed the narrowing of vision to what could be measured. Yet the figure’s beauty makes this more difficult than a cartoon against science: the concentration is compelling even as it excludes the world around him.

First devised in 1795, the image was reprinted and worked again around 1805. It belongs to the group known as the large colour prints. Elohim Creating Adam, another Tate work from that group, makes birth into the material world look painful. A worm coils around Adam’s leg. In Blake’s reading, the Fall begins with humanity’s separation from the spiritual realm, rather than merely with disobedience in Eden.

The two bodies invite comparison. Newton folds himself into his chosen task; Adam seems pinned into existence. Neither image needs an explanatory diagram of Blake’s entire mythology before it can affect you. Start with the pressure on a limb, the angle of a head, the space left around a body. The ideas arrive through those physical decisions.

London: Shakespeare’s sentence takes flight

An airborne horse and a baby do not immediately suggest a speech about murder. But Pity, in Tate’s collection, grows from Macbeth imagining the consequences of killing Duncan. Shakespeare compares pity to a newborn child and to heavenly riders. Blake gives the comparisons bodies, bringing a baby and a mounted figure above a woman stretched across the ground.

What is spoken rapidly in the theatre must now coexist on one sheet. Follow the long horizontal body below and the movement above it; the picture seems divided between absolute stillness and flight. The Tate impression is extensively finished by hand. Calling it a print should not make you expect a mechanically repeated object. Ink and watercolour could change what the printed design became.

Cambridge: the creator with a measuring instrument

The Fitzwilliam’s Ancient of Days belongs to a design made for the frontispiece of Europe a Prophecy, published in 1794. The old man reaches from a circle of light with compasses. Milton’s description of creation supplied a literary source for that instrument, but Blake’s Urizen is also a figure of restrictive authority. The image’s grandeur should not be mistaken for uncomplicated approval of the power it depicts.

Blake’s relief-etching method allowed words and pictures to be printed from the same plate. He and Catherine, his wife, coloured books by hand. A reader therefore encountered a made object with its own colours and arrangements, not a standardised edition in the modern sense. Remember the frontispiece’s place at the threshold of a book: the outstretched arm is an opening argument.

Ask each museum about the exact work before arranging your day around it. Give yourself time to adjust from the dimensions of a reproduction to the original. If you see just one of these objects, look first without trying to decode every name; then return to the detail that troubled you. With Blake, the worm or the cup can be a better starting point than a whole dictionary of symbols.