The artist Edward Calvert met Blake around 1825 and commissioned this copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience soon thereafter. These works were shaped by the later stages of the French Revolution, which was marked by regicide, the Terror, and repression of radical thinkers in Britain.
Children experience inexplicable cruelty at the hands of adults and the poet offers neither rescue nor resolution. Verse and image work together to celebrate poetic inspiration and reveal aspects of the divine as expressed through nature, but the tone of the later Songs of Experience is dark, even despairing.
He then printed and hand-colored copies of the combined sets over succeeding decades as patrons ordered them, each one visually distinct. The artist etched the printing plates in 1794, expanding the scope of his earlier Songs of Innocence.
Blake’s Songs of Experience contains twenty-seven pages.
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