William Blake

The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan c.1805–9 is a tempera painting by William Blake. Admiral Nelson (1758–1805), leader of the British Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, appears as a youthful figure with outstretched arms at the centre; a Black man with chained wrists lies fallen at his feet and numerous bodies writhe around Nelson, ensnared by the spiked coils of the Leviathan, a serpentine monster described in the Book of Job in the Bible’s Old Testament. Nelson stands astride the beast, holding its reins in his left hand. The painting is of modest proportions, despite Blake’s ambitions to paint historical subjects on a much larger scale. The colours of the blue of the sky behind Nelson, the fiery spikes along the Leviathan’s body, and the flesh-tones of the figures would originally have been much brighter but have now significantly dulled due to ageing and damage.

This painting was shown as the first artwork in Blake’s 1809 ‘one man show’ exhibition in Broad Street, London, displayed alongside a companion piece entitled The Spiritual form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth c.1805 (Tate N01110). In the Descriptive Catalogue, written to accompany the 1809 exhibition, Blake explains that he has depicted Nelson commanding the biblical serpent Leviathan as it crushes ‘the Nations of the Earth’ in its ‘wreathings’. The imperialistic overtones of this painting are undeniable. Nelson had led the British Royal Navy to victory over the French at the Battle of the Nile (1798) and over the French and Spanish at Trafalgar (1805), where he was fatally wounded. These victories substantially removed the threat of rival maritime powers and secured Britain’s naval supremacy, which would prove foundational to the consolidation and expansion of the British Empire during the following century. The title, drawn from the listing in the Descriptive Catalogue, indicates that Blake intended the depiction of Nelson not to be true to life but rather a ‘spiritual form’; hence his portrayal as a nude, youthful figure wearing a halo. The painting bears some relation to a cult of hero-worship for Nelson, as expressed in the extravagant state funeral held in his honour in 1806, as well as in artistic homages by artists like John Flaxman and Benjamin West.

It has been suggested (for example, by Brown 2020, p.100) that the inclusion of the Black man at Nelson’s feet was intended as a type for an enslaved African person, alluding to the role of the Royal Navy in enforcing the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade following its abolition in British Parliament through the Slave Trade Act of 1807. However, since this Act post-dated Nelson’s lifetime, during which the slave trade was fully operational (and Nelson was by no means an abolitionist), arguably Blake instead intends to highlight the inclusion of enslaved people within Nelson’s apparently omnipotent sway. Anti-slavery and anti-empire sentiments have often been identified in Blake’s wider body of work, for instance by the literary critic David Erdman (see David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire, New York 1992). Here, however, it is difficult to see how the Black figure could have been intended as part of a wider critique of the Empire. Blake’s representation adheres to commonplace tropes from the period, whereby Black people were stereotypically shown in positions of subjugation, dehumanisation, and marginality. The man is depicted without any distinguishing characteristics or specific identity, his presence presumably intended chiefly to signify to a white British audience the institution of slavery as a whole. The figure’s slumped, dehumanised form recalls the images of violence towards enslaved people which Blake had made for the soldier and author John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). Stedman’s Narrative condemned the violent treatment of enslaved people, but certainly did not advance an argument for the abolition of slavery itself.

Throughout the Descriptive Catalogue entries for Nelson and Pitt, Blake employs uncharacteristically patriotic rhetoric. One reason for this is Blake’s ambition to contend with his contemporaries as a history painter in the manner, for instance, of Benjamin West, who drew subjects from contemporary or recent historical events. Hence Blake announced his wish to ‘hav[e] a national commission to execute these two Pictures on a scale that is suitable to the grandeur of the nation’ on a scale of ‘one hundred feet in height’. Some scholars account for the apparently patriotic tone of Nelson with reference to its apocalyptic imagery. Art historian Paul Barlow, for instance, connects Blake’s visions of apocalypse to those of popular millenarian movements from his day, arguing that in Nelson and Pitt Blake may have been advancing a vision of the British Empire as a driver of necessary destruction, clearing the way for subsequent regeneration. This would be consistent with millenarian interpretations of violent contemporaneous events as manifestations of an unfolding Apocalypse, as foretold in the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible.

The work is painted in tempera, a medium much favoured by Blake which uses a water-based glue or gum binder to ‘temper’ the pigments, making them dry quickly and retain both the clear linearity of watercolour and the layered density of oil painting. Technical analysis has also shown that Blake applied gold leaf between paint layers, which would have added to the brilliance of the painting in its original state. In its present state, the ground layer has darkened due to the conservation treatment of ‘glue’ lining; which is only suitable for oil paintings. Layers of glue in some of Blake’s paints have also darkened. The orange tonality comes from remnants of a discoloured varnish. In the Descriptive Catalogue, Blake explained that he executed the works in ‘fresco’, for which he used his own experimental formula involving tempera, gum, glue, and chalks, rather than the classical fresco medium used by Italian Renaissance masters, which involved painting with water-based paint directly onto wet plaster. Blake also declared his hopes (ultimately in vain) to establish his ‘fresco’ technique as a serious competitor of oil painting, which was viewed as the pre-eminent medium for serious painting in the period. The picture was restored by W.G. Littlejohn and W. Graham Robertson c.1906 but was subsequently badly damaged when the Thames flooded the lower ground floor of the Tate Gallery in 1928. Only about half of Blake's original paint remains. Now, the work is cracked and damaged because Blake used a thin canvas and chalk-based ground. The contraction of the glue-rich layers and the movement of the thin canvas has created stress, causing cracking.

Further reading
Paul Barlow, ‘The Aryan Blake: Hinduism, Art and Revelation in Blake’s Pitt and Nelson Paintings’, Visual Culture in Britain, vol.12, no.3, November 2011, pp.277–92.
Alison Smith, David Blayney Brown and Carol Jacobi (eds), Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 2015, pp.100–1.
Amy Concannon and Martin Myrone, William Blake, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 2019, no.123.

Caroline Anjali Ritchie
February 2022