The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Blake · a colour print from a painted surface, the design painted on board and pulled onto paper, finished by hand in pen and ink and watercolour · one of the twelve large colour prints of 1795 · one sheet, about 46 by 60 cm, wider than high · the Tate impression, dated 1795 to about 1805, presented to the Tate by W. Graham Robertson · the unit scored is that one sheet as it stands; the other large colour prints of 1795 and the frontispiece to Europe are context
Mode
Mythic figure under indictment; a single painted print in which a named man of science becomes the type of a way of knowing
Mythos
The measurer of the world as a fallen god, the bounds-maker Blake named Urizen; Narcissus bent over his own making; the demiurge with his compasses turned from creating to diagramming
Phase
One moment of bent attention and no event; the design of 1795, this impression printed and worked up between then and about 1805
Presentation
Colour print pulled from a painted surface, finished by hand in pen and ink and watercolour, on one sheet about 46 by 60 cm, wider than high
Register
Cold grandeur: a luminous body against the dark, a reef of printed colour, attention turned inward
Scale
One man, one rock, one diagram, one dark ground, on a sheet held close
Governing Proposition
A young man of heroic build sits on a rock grown over with red and ochre and green, folded forward over his own knees, head bowed, and reaches down with a pair of compasses to draw a triangle within an arc on a pale scroll, while the dark ground of what most read as the floor of a sea spreads round him. The wager of the sheet is that a way of knowing can be shown as a posture, the measurer closed in a loop that ends at the point of his instrument with the living world at his back, and that the picture can make the indictment in its making, the world printed by chance and the man drawn by the planning hand, while giving the reason it accuses the most beautiful body on the sheet.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
William Blake, born in 1757 and dead in 1827, made twelve large colour prints in 1795. The design was painted on a board and pulled onto paper, a process close to monotype, and each sheet was then finished by hand in pen and ink and watercolour. No two impressions were alike, and none was a reproduction of anything. Newton is one of the twelve, with Elohim Creating Adam, Nebuchadnezzar, Pity, Hecate, The House of Death and the rest. The name is given by Blake’s own inscription and by the record of the print.
The work scored here is one sheet: the impression in the Tate, London, presented by W. Graham Robertson, dated 1795 for the design and to about 1805 for this sheet as it was printed and worked up. It is about 46 by 60 cm, wider than high. The other large colour prints are context, and so is the frontispiece to Europe of 1794, where a figure bearing compasses had already appeared in Blake’s work. Whether any other impression of Newton survives is not stated here, and nothing on this page rests on it. The judgment is of the sheet as it stands.
A nude man, young and heavily muscled, sits on a rock at the left, folded forward over his own knees with his head bowed. One arm reaches down to the ground, where a pale scroll or sheet lies, and on it he draws a figure, a triangle within the arc of a circle, with a pair of compasses. The rock behind him is encrusted with growths in red, ochre and green, read as algae, lichen or polyps. The ground round him is a deep, dark, mottled field that most read as the floor of a sea. That is the whole of it: one man, one rock, one instrument, one diagram, one dark element.
Movement II
The body is folded into a closed loop. Head, arm and leg are brought round and down until the line of the figure ends at the point of the compasses, so that the man becomes the shape his instrument draws. The pose is the argument. Take away any of the main elements and the sheet fails. The compasses are the act the picture accuses; the diagram is the one made thing in the image and the reason his back is bent; the rock is what he turns from; the dark ground is what surrounds him. Without the rock the figure is a nude study, and without the ground there is nothing for him to be lost in.
What yields is texture. The growths on the rock were printed by a chance process, not composed growth by growth, and their exact extent could be other than it is. Some of the anatomy belongs to a repertoire Blake used elsewhere and could be redistributed without loss. The configuration is compelled; its surface is partly permitted. That is the right division for a work whose meaning lies in the opposition of the planned and the unplanned: the planned parts are fixed, and the unplanned ones are free because they are meant to be.
What the posture discloses can be put in words. The reasoner who measures is folded in on himself, his eyes on a diagram he has made, while the coloured, growing world is literally at his back and the dark of the unknown round him. The instrument closes as it measures: the compasses describe a circle, the figure becomes one, and the knowledge it gains is bounded. The disclosure is a thesis about a mode of mind, polemical in its frame, and much of its edge depends on knowing whom the name names. It is not a human condition shown in its full ambiguity, and that holds it below the summit’s bar.
Movement III
Blake gave the thesis in words elsewhere, in a letter to Thomas Butts: “May God us keep / From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!” The sheet does not need the lines. It builds its myth in its own terms, pose, element and instrument, and it keeps the name. A named man of the century before becomes the measurer of the world as a fallen god, the type Blake drew in his books as Urizen, the bounds-maker with his compasses. Under that type lie older ones: Narcissus bent over a surface that returns only his own making, and the demiurge with his compasses, turned from creating the world to diagramming it.
What keeps the image from a cartoon is the body. The measurer is beautiful, young and godlike, the most beautiful figure on the sheet, and so the picture discloses the grandeur of the reason it indicts. Whether it condemns Newton or admires him, or both, is still argued, and the argument is the evidence that the image is not exhausted by its thesis. The myth is load-bearing, but part of it is completed only in Blake’s illuminated books, outside this sheet, and the sheet borrows from them. Of those books, Jerusalem stands at 8.9 on this desk and Milton at 8.7.
The departure is double. The portrait of the man of science showed him clothed and honoured at his desk among his instruments, and the eighteenth century had given Newton an apotheosis; Blake strips him and sets him at the floor of a dark sea under indictment. The history painting of the Royal Academy took Michelangelo as its ideal of the body, and Blake takes that ideal for the accused. In medium, the print is neither a reproduction nor an edition, outside every category the market or the Academy recognised, and Blake, who had few buyers, went further from them by it. The swerve holds at the gate, not above it: the medium had precedents in printmaking, and the heroic nude was the Academy’s own.
Movement IV
Two processes meet on one sheet. The rock and the ground were made by paint pressed and pulled, a granular, accidental, organic surface that no brush plans: the living world made by chance and growth. The man was made by line and wash, by the hand that plans. The image’s opposition of the measured and the unmeasured is therefore in its making, and the printed rock is the finest passage of it, a reticulated surface of reds, ochres and greens that reads at once as stone, as coral and as living tissue, achieved by a process Blake controlled only in part and then drew into with the brush. It glows behind the man like a reef he does not see.
The flesh is modelled in watercolour over the printed ground with a firm, sculptural light, and the contours are drawn with a sure pen; the body set luminous against the dark has the weight of a monument at the size of a sheet. The costs are plain. The anatomy is Blake’s convention, the muscles schematised and the head small and stylised. The dark ground is in places dull and opaque rather than deep. The diagram and the scroll are summary. The elevation is one sustained note, awe at beauty turned inward, without terror at full force or transport, and the scale of a print holds it there.
One law places everything. The encrusted rock at the upper left and the pale ruled diagram at the lower right are the two ends of it: the world is growth, colour and the uncontrolled, and the figure’s attention is turned from it to the measured and the white. The body sits between, belonging by its beauty to the living and by its gesture to the measured, and the dark surrounds both. The wide format lets the body fold along its length and the dark spread behind it, and the circle on the scroll is small enough that the viewer must bend to it, as he does. Nothing breaks the law, but its territory is small: one figure, one rock, one gesture, one ground.
Movement V
In its own decade and the next the print moved almost no one. The large colour prints went to a handful of buyers and were not seen, and Blake’s large prints stayed little known until the later nineteenth century. The recovery came through Gilchrist’s life of Blake in 1863 and the Pre-Raphaelite and later recovery that followed, and then through the Tate. Since the later twentieth century the image has been among the most reproduced of British images, the emblem of reason’s critique on book covers and in argument, and Eduardo Paolozzi’s colossal bronze after it stands in the piazza of the British Library, the critique of reason set up as the emblem of a library. Its reach in painting proper is modest.
The questions remain open after about two and a quarter centuries: whether the setting is a sea floor, a cave or the sea of time and space; whether the growth on the rock is life or fossil; what the diagram is; how the process was carried out, debated and reconstructed by printmakers and conservators; whether the twelve prints form a programme. The sheet yields at two distances, the figure from across a room and the printed surface close to. Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, a print of the same decade in which a man is bent over by his own mind, stands at 8.6 on this desk, and Dürer’s Melencolia I, its ancestor, a seated brooding figure with compasses, at 8.8.
The sheet is paper with watercolour and is sensitive to light, so it is shown in rotation and not continuously, and its colours may have shifted. It holds consciousness, nature, knowledge, the mythic and the history of a named man’s age, integrated in one body; it holds no family, no labour, no state and no other person. In the Tate impression the man still sits folded on his rock, the reef still glows at his back, and the point of the compasses still rests on the circle he has drawn.
Act III · The Twelve
Taken element by element the sheet resists subtraction. The compasses cannot go: they are the act the picture accuses and the point where his attention ends. The diagram cannot go: it is the one made thing in the image and the reason his back is bent. The rock cannot go: its coloured, teeming growth is what he turns from, and without it the figure is a nude study. The dark ground cannot go: it surrounds and drowns him. The fold of the body, head, arm and leg brought into one closed loop down to the scroll, is the argument made into a pose. What yields is texture: the growths on the rock were printed by a chance process, not placed one by one, and some of the anatomy is a repertoire Blake used elsewhere.
Score: 8.4 / 10
What the sheet discloses can be stated. A way of knowing can be shown as a posture: the reasoner who measures is folded in on himself, eyes down on a diagram of his own making, while the living world is at his back and the dark of the unknown round him. The instrument closes as it measures; the compasses describe a circle and the figure becomes one, and the knowledge is a bounded knowledge. And the measurer is young and godlike in body, so the image discloses the grandeur of the reason it indicts. Held below the gate because the disclosure is a thesis about a mode of mind, polemical in its frame, more than a human condition in its full ambiguity, and much of its edge depends on knowing whom the name names.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The elevation is real and of a cold kind. The body set luminous against the dark has a monumental weight: the mass of the shoulders and the curve of the back carry it at the size of a sheet. The second height is the setting, the sunk, dark element behind the man who draws a circle on the floor of it, the sense of an abyss at his back. The third is the colour of the rock, a burst of red and gold printed texture that glows like a living reef. It is one sustained note, awe at beauty turned inward, rather than recurring summits. There is no terror at full force and no transport, and the scale of a print holds it.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Built, not evoked. A named man of the century before is made into an archetype while keeping his name: the measurer of the world as a fallen god, the type Blake drew as Urizen, the compass-bearing maker of bounds. The construction is load-bearing: the posture of enclosure, the dark element round him and the circle on the floor together make the myth of reason as a fall into the bounded, and the image carries it without text. Older patterns lie under it: Narcissus bent over a surface that returns only his own making; the demiurge with his compasses, turned from creating the world to diagramming it. Held from the top because part of the myth is completed only in Blake’s books, outside this sheet, and the sheet borrows from them.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance: British history painting of the Royal Academy, with Michelangelo as its ideal of the body; the portrait of the man of science, clothed and honoured at his desk among instruments; and the reproductive print. The departures are two and both risky. In subject, the honoured scientist of the nation is stripped and set at the floor of a dark sea as a mythic figure under indictment, the reverse of the apotheosis Newton was given in the eighteenth century. In medium, a print that is neither reproduction nor edition, pulled from paint and finished by hand into a unique work, outside every category the market or the Academy recognised. The stake was real: Blake had few buyers, and this course led him further from them. Held at the gate because the medium had precedents in printmaking and the Michelangelesque nude was the Academy’s own type.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and much is lost. The printed texture is the knowledge: the rock and ground come from paint pressed and pulled, a granular, accidental, organic surface no brush plans, while the man is made by line and wash, by the hand that plans. The opposition of the measured and the unmeasured is in the making, two processes on one sheet. The wide format lets the body fold along its length and the dark spread behind it. The size, a sheet held close, makes the circle on the scroll small enough to require a bent gaze from the viewer, which repeats his. Held below the top because a painting could carry the image, losing that duality of process but not its meaning, and much of the knowledge is in the pose, which any medium could hold.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over promise: about two and a quarter centuries, though Blake’s large prints were little seen until the later nineteenth century. The questions stay open. Whether the image condemns Newton or admires him, or both, since the body is the most beautiful thing in it. Whether the setting is a sea floor, a cave or the sea of time and space. Whether the growth on the rock is life or fossil. What the diagram is. How the process was carried out, debated and reconstructed by printmakers and conservators. Whether the twelve prints form a programme. It yields at two distances, the figure from across a room and the printed surface close to. Held below the top because the polemical core is quickly grasped and many open questions concern Blake’s system more than this sheet.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is British painting and printmaking of the 1790s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation in two respects: the scientific hero turned into a figure of mythic critique, and the painted print made a unique object; the sheet gives the Romantic case against mechanist reason its single image. In its own decade and the next it moved almost no one, for the large prints went to a handful of buyers and were not seen. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the recovery through Gilchrist’s life of Blake (1863), the Pre-Raphaelites and after; the Tate; the image as the emblem of reason’s critique on book covers and in argument; Eduardo Paolozzi’s colossal bronze after it in the piazza of the British Library. Its reach in painting proper is modest.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two hundred and thirty years for the design and a little over two hundred and twenty for this sheet. Form: the image stands as Blake printed and finished it, no part that carries its meaning known to be lost, though the sheet’s condition in detail is not established. Presence: obscure for most of the nineteenth century, then in the collection of W. Graham Robertson and at the Tate, and since the later twentieth century among the most reproduced British images; fame counts as presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: a work on paper with watercolour, sensitive to light, shown in rotation and not continuously, its colours perhaps shifted. The fragility of paper and the long obscurity keep it from the widest figure.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged as command of the colour print finished by hand, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing. The printed rock is the finest passage: a granular, reticulated surface of reds, ochres and greens that reads at once as stone, as coral and as living tissue, made by a process Blake controlled only in part and then drew into with the brush. The flesh is modelled in watercolour over the printed ground with a firm, sculptural light, and the contours are drawn with a sure pen. The costs are charged: the anatomy is Blake’s convention, the muscles schematised and the head small and stylised; the dark ground is in places dull and opaque rather than deep; the diagram and the scroll are summary.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the encrusted, many-coloured rock at the upper left and the pale ruled diagram at the lower right. One law holds them, and it is the law of the image: the world is growth, colour and the uncontrolled, and the figure’s attention is turned from it to the measured and the white. Every element is placed by that opposition. The body sits between the two, belonging by its beauty to the living and by its gesture to the measured; the dark ground surrounds both as the element of the unknown. Nothing contradicts the law: colour, process and pose all serve it. Held below the top because the territory is small, one figure, one rock, one gesture, one ground, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: consciousness, as a mode of attention made visible in posture; the natural order, as rock, growth and sea; knowledge and science, as instrument and diagram; the sacred and the mythic, in the type of the fallen god; and history, in a named man of the century before made a figure of his age’s thought. They are integrated: the body is where consciousness, nature and science meet. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state, no other person. The image holds more orders than its single figure suggests, because its subject is a view of the world, but it is a sheet with one man in it, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Archetypal Deep, The Made and The Inner Law at 8.6. An image with no part that carries its meaning known to be lost after two centuries, and now among the most reproduced of British images; a named man made the myth of reason as a fall into the bounded, without a word of text; a printed surface of chance growth set against the planned line of the man; and one opposition of the living and the measured that places every element on the sheet.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: consciousness, nature, knowledge, the mythic and history meet in one body, but there is no family, no labour, no state and no other person, and the figure describes a sheet with one man in it. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, a reach delayed by decades and wide as an image more than in painting; then The Sublime at 8.1, one cold note held by the scale of a print.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 falls two tenths short, its disclosure a polemical thesis about a mode of mind, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 falls five tenths short, its reach delayed and carried more by the image than by painting. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 100.0, an average of 8.33 that displays 8.3, seven tenths short of the 9.0 the summit requires; the aggregate holds the print in Tier IV, and the Epochal Gate would withhold the summit besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Newton as an image and as a record of making, held well; thinly for the condition and close handling of this particular sheet beyond what is widely reproduced, so that where a judgment turns on them (The Made, The Imperishable) it is held more loosely. No impression, image or written source was consulted for this page. The work scored is one sheet: the Tate impression, a colour print pulled from a design painted on board and finished by hand in pen and ink and watercolour, about 46 by 60 cm, the design of 1795 and this sheet printed and worked up between then and about 1805, presented to the Tate by W. Graham Robertson. The other large colour prints of 1795 and the compass-bearing frontispiece to Europe (1794) are context and are not scored; Blake’s illuminated books are named for the myth the sheet borrows from them. Gilchrist, the Tate, the book covers and Paolozzi’s bronze at the British Library are reception, weighed on reach and presence. The only words quoted are Blake’s two lines to Thomas Butts; the title is his inscription. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the evidence for the later date of this impression, the year of the gift to the Tate, the date of the letter to Butts, the date of Paolozzi’s bronze, the descent of the pose from particular models, whether any other impression of the print survives, and the sheet’s condition in detail. The reading of the setting as a sea floor, of the growths, and of the diagram are given as readings, none settled.