Tuesday 13 August 2013

Mackmurdo & the influence of William Blake

These notes were written over twenty years ago when I was endeavouring to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Mackmurdo with a small exhibition at Forty Hall Museum, Enfield, and now urgently need revision. I place them in this blog for their connection to the reception of William Blake.

The search for the origins of Art Nouveau leads back to the late eighteenth century, to the visionary painter-poet William Blake (1757-1827), who anticipated many of its dominant motifs. The swirling S-patterns of many of Blake's compositions, as well as the manner in which text is juxtaposed with illustration in the Illuminated Books, foreshadow much that was to become characteristic of Art Nouveau design and book illustration.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the first to rediscover Blake's genius. From the first, Rossetti felt Blake's art confirmed his own convictions. Blake's violent rejection of Baroque painting and his fierce attacks on Rubens, Rembrandt, and Reynolds were "balsam to Rossetti's soul, and grist to his mill". Blake's sketches may have helped Rossetti form his own conception of a style entirely opposed to Baroque, his forms developing upon a flat surface, their outlines firmly indicted. Just as a strong influence of Blake's poetry is to be felt in Rossetti's The Blesséd Damozel 1847, so do his early paintings reveal analogies to Blake's style and subjects. Blake's way of disposing the profile and the axis of an inclined head horizontally became typical of Rossetti's art too. This bend of the head in a strange and almost gliding movement was then considered essentially Pre-Raphaelite until it was adopted by Art Nouveau artists in continental Europe.


Rossetti introduced the members and friends of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to Blake's work. Their age thus became haunted by Blake, merely because Rossetti had rediscovered him. Edward Burne-Jones shared Rossetti's admiration for Blake. In many elements that he borrowed from the great visionary,one can feel their close formal and intellectual affinity. Burne-Jones' Orpheus series of 1875 both embodies Blake's influence and already reveals features of English Art Nouveau.

In 1868 Swinburne completed his important essay on Blake in which he speaks of the "flame-like impulse of the idea" in Blake's art. Swinburne had the binding and title-page of the essay decorated with flames and small figures borrowed from the margins of Blake's Jerusalem. The initiative for this essay came from Rossetti, without whom Swinburne, as founder and promoter of English literary Symbolism, would never have written his brilliant essay on Blake, by which Blake became an ideal for a whole school of poets and writers.



Swinburne's book-length essay began as a review of Gilchrist's Life of Blake (1863). When, in 1880 a new edition of Gilchrist was needed, Frederick Shields, who also wrote on Blake and later worked with Mackmurdo, designed the binding. On the one hand, this binding clearly imitates Blake; on the other hand, it satisfies the demands of Art Nouveau even in the ambiguous relationship of the gold design to its greenish-purple ground, or of the purplish-green design to its gold ground. (And doesn't this motif perhaps have its origin in Blake's exploitation of the ambiguities of white-line engraving?)

In 1876 the first retrospective exhibition of Blake's work was held at the Burlington Fine Arts Cub in London where it was seen and admired by may of the more forward-looking artists and designers. A flowing, undulating Gothic linearity characterises the graphic work of William Blake. There is in the Songs of Innocence for example, not only the smoothly flowing line, but also a comprehension of the page: the interrelationship of typography and ornament. William Blake must be considered a formative influence on English Art Nouveau.

At the very start of his career, Walter Crane had known Blake's work. (Crane was a pupil of W.J. Linton who engraved the illustrations for Gilchrist's Life.) In his later writings on the teaching of art, he never failed to express his gratitude to Blake's example, and for didactic purposes reproduced many of the master's designs to illustrate his own arguments.

If English Art Nouveau appears in its full perfection in the work of A.H. Mackmurdo, it seems obvious that in his own work, Mackmurdo tried to incorporate some of the vitality and expressiveness he had found in Blake. It was Mackmurdo, the admirer of Blake, who produced the first work which combined all the characteristics of Art Nouveau: the chair with fretwork back designed in 1881, and the second, the title-page of Wren's City Churches, published in 1883.

Mackmurdo's counter-change system, reminiscent of seaweed caught in opposing currents or a tree branch fighting against a two-way hurricane, has its roots not only in Japanese prints by Hokusai, but also in the work of  William Blake. The painter-poet's strongly rhythmic motifs, twisting organically and twining their way round the pages of the Songs of Innocence, were well known to Mackmurdo. But it is not merely Blake's sense of decoration that was the inspiration for Mackmurdo's designs of 1882 to 1886; it was as if Blake had been seen through the eyes of a Japanese wood-cut artist, so simplified and flattened are his forms, so one-dimensional the space that surrounds them.

Mackmurdo was acquainted with the Gilchrist family (widow and children of Blake's biographer) and his partner Herbert Horne collected drawings and prints by Blake and his followers. Herbert Horne uses elongated Blake-like figures in his Angel with the Trumpet fabric. We find reminiscences of Blake in bindings and designs by Heywood Sumner and other associates of the Century Guild.

Artistic and literary journals played an important role in the development and spread of new ideas in design; in the first of these journals, The Century Guild Hobby Horse, we can trace the impact of Blake's work on the later nineteenth century. The January 1886 number of the Hobby Horse carried an enthusiastic article on Blake by Herbert H. Gilchrist, son of Blake's biography, Alexander Gilchrist, and a reproduction  of Blake's illustrated broadsheet, Little Tom the Sailor.

Gilchrist wrote: "What a marvellous sample of typewriting is the Ballad written out with a brush ... while as legible as ordinary types, every letter has naïve expression, capital letters flaunt capriciously down the page each giving a defiant kick of its own. With all the charm of decorative fitness the print answers directly its purpose as a broadsheet".

An emphasis on the work of William Blake was to become a dominant theme of the Hobby Horse. The 1887 numbers were to contain a photogravure of the life-mask of William Blake, a facsimile of Blake's Sibylline leaf on Homer and Virgil, essays by Herbert Horne on the life-mask and the Sibylline Leaf, and the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell, now first printed from the engraved original".

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