WILLIAM BLAKE
(1757-1827)
 

The Good and Evil Angels Struggling for Possession of a Child

c.1793-4

pen and watercolour on paper,

29.5 x 44.2 cm

inscribed on reverse: £5-5

P.272

This is a slightly later development of the design on plate IV of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, dated 1790 on one copy but almost certainly not completed until 1793. The watercolour was the basis for the large colour print of 1795 which is in reverse, and must have been painted between these two dates.

A complex stylistic and iconographic link with the watercolour of Los and Orc (Butlin no.225) makes it possible to identify the tethered figure as Orc and the figure holding the child as Los. The figure of the child and its relationship to the ‘Good’ Angel, and indeed the general composition, are close to Blake’s engraving after Stothard for one of the illustrations to Joseph Ritson’s Select Collection of English Songs, 1793, I, p.170.

EJ

PROVENANCE: Mrs. Blake; sold to C.A. Tulk or brother-in-law Sigismund Stolterforth; by descent to Mrs. Gladys Nottidge; Sotheby’s 10 December 1958, lot 95, bought by P&D Colnaghi Ltd, for the Gallery.

EXHIBITIONS: William Blake and his Circle, London, British Museum, 1958, no.5; Watercolours  and Drawings from The Cecil Higgins Art Gallery Bedford, London, Thos. Agnew & Sons Ltd, 1962, no.28; The English Tradition, Bedford, Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, 1972, no.6; William Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism, Chicago, Chicago Historical Society, 1988, no.47; Innocence and Experience: images of children in British Art from 1600 to the present, Manchester, Manchester City Art Gallery, 1992, no.53.

REFERENCES:  M. Butlin, ‘The Bicentenary of William Blake’, Burlington Magazine, vol.C, 1958, pp.41-2, ill. p.45 fig. 3; A. Blunt, The Art of William Blake, 1959, p.42, 61 & 62, pl. 32a;  M. Butlin ,¢Blakes Vala, or the Four Zoas and a new Water-colour in the Tate Gallery’, Burlington Magazine, vol. CVI, 1964, pp.381-382;  J. Beer, Blake’s Humanism, 1968, pp. 192, 256, ill. 30b;  G.E. Bentley, Blake Records, 1969, pp.353-4;  D. Bindman, Blake as an Artist,  1977, p.69; M. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 1981, vol. I,  p.130, no.257; vol. II, pl.197;  R. Lester, The Paintings of William Blake, 1986, no.8.

Copyright © Trustees of Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford.

Extract taken from Watercolours and Drawings, Cecil Higgins Art Gallery by Evelyn Joll.