Poems by Mr Gray. Drawings by William Blake (1972)

With an introduction and commentary by Sir Geoffrey Keynes. 30cm x 24cm. Through a combination of circumstances this astonishing series of water-colour drawings, executed some 175 years ago, has remained virtually unknown until very recently. They were in fact completely lost to view for over seventy years and were only shown to the public for the first time at the Tate Gallery in October 1971. They were widely acclaimed and at once recognized to be among Blake’s most important works.

The marriage of Blake’s visual imagination to Gray’s poetry is perhaps unexpected and it is surprising that the classic Gray was able to bring out the romantic Blake, arousing a fertility of imagination even for him. Among the 116 superb water-colour designs of outstanding beauty and originality, which are unsurpassed in Blake’s later work, Blake did not aim at literal illustration but rather at reinterpretation and expansion of Gray’s themes, thus adding to the poems a new and exciting dimension. In the “Ode to a Favourite Cat” he has taken the opportunity to express his views on women and sex and, in the “Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard”, on social injustice.

Condition: dust-wrapper price-clipped, slightly worn and spotted. Some slight spotting to endpapers, pastedowns and edges of text-block.