William Blake Society talk

Printing in the Infernal Method :
William Blake’s method of ‘illuminated printing’


In 1788 William Blake invented a method of relief etching that he called ‘illuminated printing’. This made it possible to print both the text of his poems and the images that he created to illustrate them from the same copper plate in an engraver’s rolling press. The lecture will explain Blake’s invention in the context of conventional eighteenth-century illustrated book production, its metaphorical significance for Blake, the creation of the first illuminated books, like the Songs of Innocence, and how the further development of colour-printing his images led to the production of the Large Colour Prints or monotypes of 1795, Blake’s supreme achievement as a graphic artist.

Michael Phillips is Emeritus Fellow of the interdisciplinary Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. He has been guest curator of major exhibitions of Blake, in London, New York and Paris, and is currently preparing ‘William Blake Apprentice & Master’, due to open at the Ashmolean Museum in November 2014. His most recent publication on Blake is an edition in facsimile with introduction and commentary of the Bodleian Library copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, published by Bodleian Library Publications and the University of Chicago Press in 2011.

Michael’s training and research as a printmaker has enabled him to re-create how Blake produced his illuminated books.