William black biography
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William Black at 16, from a photograph.
he novelist William Black was born into the family of a small businessman, who himself came from farming lager, in the Trongate, Glasgow, in After a very piecemeal education, independent reading, and a great deal of exposure to the beauty of the Scottish countryside, he went on to study art in his hometown. As he put it self-deprecatingly han själv , "the chiefest of my ambitions was to became a landscape painter, and I labored away for a year or two at the Government School of Art, and presented my friends with the most horrible abominations in watercolor and oil. As an artist I was a complete failure, and so was qualified for becoming in after life - for a time — an art critic (qtd. in "William Black").
Realising that he was unsuited to a career as a painter, Black then veered into journalism, coming down to London in Here, his friendship with fellow-Glaswegian Robert Buchanan, then himself in the periodicals world, brought him useful con
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William Blake ( - )
Portrait of William Blake by Thomas Phillips ©Considered insane and largely disregarded by his peers, the visionary poet and engraver William Blake is now recognised among the greatest contributors to English literature and art.
He was born in Soho, London, where he lived most of his life, and was son to a hosier and his wife, both Dissenters. Blake's early ambitions lay not with poetry but with painting and at the age of 14, after attending drawing school, he was apprenticed to James Basire, engraver. After his seven-year term was complete, Blake studied at the Royal Academy, but he is known to have questioned the aesthetic doctrines of its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and his stay there was brief. It nonetheless afforded him friendships with John Flaxman and Henry Fuseli, academics whose work may have influenced him.
In , he set up a print shop, but within a few years the business floundered and for the rest of his life Blake eked out a living as
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William Blake Biography In Details
Early Life
William Blake once considered mad for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is highly regarded today for his expressiveness and creativity, as well as the philosophical and mystical undercurrents that reside within his work. His work has been characterized as part of the Romantic movement, or even "Pre-Romantic", for its largely having appeared in the 18th century.
Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the established Church, Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg.
Despite these known influences, the originality and singularity of Blake's work make it difficult to classify. One 19th century scholar characterised Blake as a "glorious luminary," "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors."