William Blake Sculpture
A Note on the Paradise Lost Series
John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is a vast epic poem, inspired by the Book of Genesis, on an imaged series of events leading up to the climactic expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Though not widely known after it was composed in 1674, the poem grew in popularity to be hailed eventually within a century after its composition as the greatest epic poem of the English language. Rarely read today, it would have been read by nearly all educated Englishmen during the lifetime of William Blake.
Blake created two series of illustrations for “Paradise Lost”, one in 1807 and one in 1808. Blake’s later series of illustrations, created expressly for his long-standing patron Thomas Butts, is clearly the better of the two. It consists of twelve illustrations of key plot moments in the poem. The images that I use are printed at roughly half the scale of the original works. Blake, an engraver by trade, delineated these illustrations with precise pen outlines and then added a slight degree of water color. My “Paradise Lost” series is made with digital images that I download from the William Blake Archive. For the purposes of my art I have enhanced some of Blake’s colors with pastel.
“Satan, Sin, and Death: Satan Comes to the Gates of Hell”
