LETTERS OF WILLIAM BLAKE.
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Let us see you sometimes as well as sometimes hear from you, and let us often see your works.
Compliments to Mrs. Cumberland and family.
—Yours in head and heart, Will Blake.
A merry Christmas.
Revd. Sir,—I find more and more that my style of designing is a species by itself, and in this which I send you have been compelled by my Genius or Angel to follow where he led; if I were to act otherwise it would not fulfil the purpose for which alone I live, which is, in conjunction with such men as my friend Cumberland, to renew the lost art of the Greeks.[2]
- ↑ John Trusler (1735-1820), divine, compiler of Hogarth Moralized, author of The Way to be Rich and Respectable^ and many other works. He was living at Englefield Green, Egham, Surrey, close to George Cumberland.
- ↑ At a later time Blake freely criticised the art of the Greeks, mainly on account of their supposed use of a canon of proportion for the human figure, which he condemned as being founded upon memory rather than upon imagination. This is the meaning of the remark (among those which surround his print of the "Laocoon"), theGods of Greece" ... were mathematical diagrams."
