In 1878, in the hours before he lost his hold on sanity in his villa on Coniston Water, John Ruskin looked at the Blakes on his walls and quoted from the poet artist's "Auguries of Innocence": "'And when gold and gems stud the plough.' Oh—you dear Blake—and so mad too."
Blake, like Ruskin, was a visionary, albeit one almost entirely ignored in his lifetime. He only ever sold 61 copies of his Illuminated Books - artefacts that are now almost beyond price. This sense of retained potency may be why his posthumous influence became so pervasive, explosive, even. Ever since his reappraisal by Ruskin, Rossetti, and Yeats, Blake has become a radical bearer of new ways of making art that saw new visions of a world without slavery, tyranny and the abuse of humans and non-humans.
Blake's celebration of gender-slipping sensuality and shape-shifting spirituality has been carried on a stream of fantastical conscious: from his Romantic origins through modernism and surrealism and onto the urgent priorities of our time. In this wide-ranging, illustrated lecture, Philip Hoare explores this magical transformation, and shows how the transcendent power of Blake's art still holds our attention in the 21st century.