William Blake: The Gates of Paradise

Tundra Books has a good eye for the zeitgeist.

You might say that the publisher's new nonfiction YA book, William Blake: The Gates of Paradise, is a sure thing: lovely color pictures and the fascinating life story of an already-beloved artist.

But as biographer Bedard shows us, Blake's artistic struggles are not simply timeless—they're uniquely relevant to us today. Case in point: the day I finished the book I found an online interview with Billy Childish, an English artist who is still very much alive. When Childish was at art school in the 1970s, he said in this interview, he was laughed at for loving Van Gogh, who wasn't as popular then as he is now. When Blake was at the Royal Academy art school in the 1770s, Bedard writes, he was laughed at for loving Raphael and Michaelangelo, who weren't as popular then as they are now. Being an artist, it seems, was never for the faint of heart.

But onto Bedard's book. The biographer has done a nice job of situating Blake in his time and place—the dirty, lively city of London in the 18th century—and in so doing shows younger readers how his life meshed with his world. The book is pleasingly organized into 16 chapters and a little prologue, with images from The Gates of Paradise opening each section. (The Gates of Paradise was Blake's illustrated book that chronicled the life cycle from birth to death.)

In 1757 William Blake was born to a shopkeeping couple who sold gloves and stockings to rich Londoners who lived on the city's green "squares" and not on the teeming little streets like the one where Blake's family lived. William's parents were religious "dissenters" (not members the Church of England) who educated their kids at home. As an adult Blake would write:

Thank God I never was sent to school
To be Flogd into following the Style of a Fool

But he did get some training. He learned the basics of drawing when he enrolled at Pars Drawing School at the age of 10; the Royal Academy thing happened later and proved to be much less useful. Then came his apprenticeship to an engraver. Engraving was the only way paintings and drawings were reproduced then, and it was one way an artist could make a living. The trade impacted Blake's life and his art thoroughly and permanently. Although it marked him as a mere craftsman in the eyes of class-conscious upper-crusters it was to serve as his primary mode of original artistic expression throughout his life.

That's because no one much liked Blake's ideas—about spirituality, about how books for children should be written, or about anything else. And since no publisher was likely to pay him for them, he used his engraving know-how, bought a printing press, and made his books himself. In the various little city and country houses they inhabited, he and his devoted wife Catherine printed up his creations, tried to sell them, and cobbled together enough of a living to, well, stay alive.

Bedard gives us lots of detail as A backdrop to Blake's life, but he himself has just a few key points to make and he makes them well. (One small editorial weirdness: Bedard keeps bringing up new concepts without explaining them, only to define and contextualize them later on. A good example is Blake's character Albion. He's mentioned once but his name isn't explained as the Latin word for England--a-ha!--until he comes up again later. A bit frustrating.)

Bedard's first point: Blake was a visionary in the most literal sense. The man had visions. Starting as a young child, Blake saw things that other people didn't—like saints perched in trees and ghostly processions of pilgrims shuffling through Westminster Abbey, where he sat for hours making sketches. Bedard manages to celebrate this very quirky aspect of Blake's life without romanticizing it; he considers the strange visitations "imagination worked up into a state of vision." He adds that Blake believed everyone could see these things if they wanted to but that most people just don't try.

The other aspect of Blake's life Bedard really highlights is the modernization that was happening around him. Many of these things had very bad consequences and Blake wasn't the only one who thought so. Parentless children were adopted by workhouses and then worked to death, which Blake lamented in his poems. Also, Blake lost commercial engraving work to practitioners who were willing to work in an assembly-line fashion, banging out less-detailed images in the fashionable (and cheap!) style of the times. Again, artists must be lionhearted.

Luckily, Blake can serve as an inspiration. He understood that craft and art are closely united, and that to divorce a person's vision with the means of its production was death to art. This was one OF Blake's most thrilling ideas, and Bedard is right to give it special attention. His biography is a loving but not glowing account of a passionate, eccentric renegade that is well aimed at young readers. Who better to keep his punk rock spirit alive?