Product Description

William Blake: The Painter at Work offers an innovative and revealing approach to one of the most individual of all British artists. Although the highly idiosyncratic nature of Blake's techniques has long been recognized, this is the first book to explore the practical methods behind his unique style--providing a fuller understanding of exactly how this secretive artist worked as a painter.

Richly illustrated with Blake's temperas, watercolors, and color prints and drawings, the book includes essays by leading international authorities who illuminate Blake's techniques and materials using up-to-the-minute research methods. Their analysis of numerous individual works reveals, for example, that Blake used essentially the same range of colors in them all, even if some of the more than 100 temperas he painted from 1799 to 1826 have since darkened or faded.

The book consists of four main sections. Introductory chapters are followed by essays on Blake's watercolors, large color prints, and temperas. An epilogue discusses the presentation of the paintings, and appendices provide more detail on the works discussed. The contributors are John Anderson, Peter Bower, Noa Cahaner McManus, John Dean, Robin Hamlyn, Bronwyn Ormsby, Brian Singer, Joyce H. Townsend, and Piers Townshend.

William Blake: The Painter at Work not only casts new light on the incomparable oeuvre that made Blake one of the most perennially popular of visual artists but also points to ways of preserving this work for future generations. There are still unanswered questions, but now there are answers too.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4127115 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Amazon.com Review
Conservation scientist Joyce H. Townsend is the Tate Museum's answer to coroner Gus Grissom on TV's CSI. Only instead of solving murders, she sleuths out the violence done to great art. In this book, she and her colleagues explain the horrors time, faded pigments, and dumb owners have visited on Blake's paintings, use a slew of high-tech techniques to deduce his methods and open our eyes to his original intentions. If you haven't read this book, you probably don't know what Blake's work looks like. Skillfully employing gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, lasers, Fourier transform infra-red spectrometry, and good old-fashioned saliva on a cotton swab, they scrub away dirt, yellowed varnish, and moronic overpaintings, and reveal how Blake wanted you to see. A tiny edge of blue indicates the firmament that Satan originally strode through in the now-yellowed Satan in His Original Glory. The chemical "Maillard reaction" has horribly browned The Ghost of a Flea; a small detail illustration reveals the original brilliant, star-studded blue Blake intended. The detective work is fascinating, and the profuse illustrations both technically and esthetically illuminating. Blake would have sung hosannas over this book: it cleanses the doors of perception. --Tim Appelo

Review
First-rate color and black-and-white illustrations including scientific details add to this valuable, first rate study and important contribution.
(Choice )

William Blake himself said 'You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.' While those with a general interest in Blake may find here a surfeit of detail regarding the painter and poet's technique, for Blake experts, painters, and conservationists this will be just enough.
(Library Journal )

Review
This is a major contribution to Blake scholarship, the first of its kind in many ways. I suspect that it may also set the standard for other such studies of artists. All the essays are firmly grounded in research: materialist, technical, scientific, historical. The information they provide is truly that--information--with accompanying insights, not the sort of speculative interpretations so frequently encountered in literary and iconographic studies of Blake.
(Robert Essick, author of "William Blake, Printmaker" and "William Blake and the Language of Adam" )

Customer Reviews

indispensable
An indispenasable book for those interested in the latest research
on William Blake's techniques as an artist.