Prints and Drawings Room
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- William Blake 1757–1827
- Medium
- Graphite on paper. verso: graphite on paper
- Dimensions
- Support: 291 × 450 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by Mrs John Richmond 1922
- Reference
- A00040
Catalogue entry
A00040 Sketches for ‘Tiriel Supporting the Dying Myratana’
c. 1789 (recto and verso)
A 00040 / B 200
Pencil 291 × 450 (11 1/2 × 17 3/4)
Inscribed on recto by Frederick Tatham ‘These few fine Lines by William Blake vouched by Fredk Tatham’ b.r.
Presented by Mrs John Richmond 1922
PROVENANCE
Mrs Blake; Frederick Tatham; his brother-in-law George Richmond, sold Christie's 29 April 1897 (in 147, with 22 other works; see no.2) £2.10.0 bt Dr Richard Sisley; his daughter Mrs John Richmond
LITERATURE
Michael Tolley, review of 1971 edition of this catalogue, Blake Newsletter, VI, 1972–3, p.29; Butlin 1981, no.200, pls.227 and 228
The drawings on both the recto and the verso are almost certainly connected with ‘Tiriel Supporting the Dying Myratana and Cursing his Sons’, one of the twelve pen and wash drawings illustrating Blake's poem Tiriel
(Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection; Butlin 1981, no.198 1, pl.223). The aged Tiriel, with his dying wife Myratana, upbraids and curses their three sons who have driven him into exile (Keynes Writings
1957, p.89; Bentley Tiriel 1967, pp.60–61). The architectural background of the finished drawing is absent, and the gestures of the figures are somewhat different, but the confrontation of the two groups is very close in feeling. The drawing on the recto also has elements of ‘Tiriel Upheld on the Shoulders of Ijim’ (Victoria and Albert Museum; Butlin no.198 7; repr. Bentley 1967, pl.5).
The twelve finished pen and wash drawings illustrate, more or less closely, the manuscript known as Tiriel
from the name of its chief protagonist (British Museum, Dept of MS. EG2876; repr. in full Bentley 1967, pp.61–89). They measure approximately 7 1/4 × 10 3/4 in, slightly larger than and in the opposite direction to the pages of the manuscript which are 8 1/4 × 6 3/16 in. They were probably designed, had the work been published, to have been engraved in the conventional way. This supports a date before Blake's fusion of text and illustration in one technical process in the illuminated books which began in There is no Natural Religion and All Religions are One of c.1788, and, in its fully developed form, in Songs of Innocence of 1789. Most authorities, including Anthony Blunt (1959, p.11) and Bentley, have dated both manuscript and drawings to c.1789; David Bindman (1977, pp.44–7, and exh. cat. 1982–3, pp.46, 78) suggests that they may have been begun at a rather earlier date, c.1786.
This work was formerly inventoried as no.3694 xi.
Published in:
Martin Butlin, William Blake 1757-1827, Tate Gallery Collections, V, London 1990
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