Newly-uncovered Blake drawings in the British Museum

In late July and early August, 2001, Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi, co-editors with Morris Eaves of the William Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org), and David Clarke and Rod Tidwell, London-based professional photographers, spent a week shooting over 1200 transparencies of Blake’s works in the Department of Prints and Drawings of the British Museum. In the course of this work, the group discovered eight previously unknown pencil sketches by Blake and one by either Blake or his brother Robert. All are on the versos of recorded works. Since the publication in 1981 of Martin Butlin’s monumental catalogue of Blake’s paintings and drawings,1 the staff of the Print Room has been removing a few of Blake’s drawings and prints from their old mounts, for reasons either of conservation or exhibition, and rematting them according to current standards. Some of these efforts were motivated by the Blake exhibition at Tate Britain, 9 November 2000 to 11 February 2001, but in at least one case the rematting probably occurred as early as 1982. Some of the works were pasted down, on all four edges, to their old backing mats, whereas the new matting procedures required the sheets to be hinged at the top. Hence, the versos were uncovered during rematting and left permanently available for inspection. It was of course great fun for the photography team to lift a mat, turn over a drawing or print, and discover a “new” Blake.