William Blake: The Ancient of Days: Great Art Explained

[Uncle Joe]

“Shall [we] call him Artist or Genius—or Mystic—or Madman? Probably he is all.”

The 18th century artist William Blake was a true radical, in the deepest sense of the world, and he raged against injustice of every kind.

Blake belonged to the Romantic age, but stands utterly alone in that age, both as an artist and as a poet: he is someone who invented his very own form of graphic art, which organically fused beautiful images with powerful poetry, while he also forged his own distinctive philosophical world-view and created an original cosmology of gods and spirits, designed to express his ideas about love, freedom, nature and the Divine.