The Ghost of A Flea - Description

Description

The muscular and nude Flea is depicted using its jutting tongue to gorge on a bowl of blood. Part human, part vampire and part reptile, the beast strides from right to left between heavy and richly patterned curtains. In his left hand he holds an acorn and in his right a thorn, both items drawn from the tradition of fairy iconography. His massive neck is similar to that of a bull, and holds a disproportionally small head, marked by glaring eyes and open jaws, and a venomous slithering tongue. According to the art critic Jonathan Jones, the flea is depicted as an "evil, gothic, grotesque stalking through a starry realm between stage curtains."

Ghost of a Flea is distinguished by its innovative use of gold leaf. Beneath the curtain folds, the flesh of the flea and bright stars, Blake placed a thin foil of "white" gold which he made from gold-silver alloy. He then used a brush and powdered gold foil made into paint to colour much of the minute detail. Blake overlayed using thick brown paint derived from sugar, gum and glue.

The painting was created using Blake's distinctive tempera technique, which he describes in the lower right of the panel, beneath the shell gold signature, as "fresco". On the reverse of the panel is written, "The Vision of the Spirit that inhabits the body of a Flea, and which appeared to the late Mr. Blake, the Designer of the vignettes for Blair Grave and the Book of Job. The Visions first appeared to him in my presence, and after wards till he had finished this picture. The Flea drew blood on this." Today the work is in relatively poor condition, partly due to the technique employed by Blake. Areas of the surface have cracked and dulled with age.

Although Blake was singular in his ability to directly transcribe visions onto canvas or paper, a number of visual and literary sources can be detected in this work. The art historian Hope Werness suggested that The Flea may be inspired by a 1665 work by early microscopist Robert Hooke (1635–1703), whose Micographia, or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies being Made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon includes a drawing of a flea microscopically observed.

Comparisons have been made to Henry Fuseli's monstrous imps, while the image of the flea echos figures in Blake's earlier work, and his scaly body is similar to the monster in his 1805 pen and ink drawing Pestilence: Death of the First Born. In 2006, the Tate hung The Ghost of a Flea and William Raddon's 1827 engraving after Fuseli's The Nightmare side by side in the "The Nightmare in Modern Culture" room of their "Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination" exhibition.