Catherine Blake - Role in Blake's Art

Role in Blake's Art

Throughout her husband's uneven career, Catherine not only took an active role in the production of William's engravings and illuminated books; she also ran the household finances and offered strong practical support. William's friend J.T. Smith said that Blake "allowed her, to the last moment of his practice, to take off his proof impressions and print his works, which she did most carefully." Catherine's role in colouring at least some of William's illuminated books has been widely acknowledged, although her hand is usually attributed to some of the more clumsily rendered passages. Her work as a printer is held in higher regard.

Read more about this topic:  Catherine Blake

Famous quotes containing the words role in, role, blake and/or art:

    Friends serve central functions for children that parents do not, and they play a critical role in shaping children’s social skills and their sense of identity. . . . The difference between a child with close friendships and a child who wants to make friends but is unable to can be the difference between a child who is happy and a child who is distressed in one large area of life.
    Zick Rubin (20th century)

    The trouble is that the expression ‘material thing’ is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for ‘sense-datum’; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he ‘perceives.’
    —J.L. (John Langshaw)

    The Divine Vision still was seen,
    Still was the human form divine
    Weeping in weak & mortal clay;
    O Jesus, still the form was thine!
    —William Blake (1757–1827)

    To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth ... but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
    Laura Riding (1901–1991)