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:

    If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.
    Betty Friedan (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)

    Struggling in my father’s hands,
    Striving against my swaddling bands,
    Bound and weary, I thought best
    To sulk upon my mother’s breast.
    —William Blake (1757–1827)

    When truth is nothing but the truth, it’s unnatural, it’s an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth. That’s why art moves you—precisely because it’s unadulterated with all the irrelevancies of real life.
    Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)