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In about 1797 the sculptor John Flaxman approached his friend William Blake to illustrate the poems of Thomas Gray as a birthday gift for his wife Nancy. A standard edition of Gray’s poems was dismembered and the individual pages mounted within large sheets of watercolor paper on which Blake drew his designs. The present sheet is from Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” a lament for the loss of youthful innocence, with the poet looking back at his halcyon schooldays at Eton compared to the bitter realities of later life. Blake shows Thomas Gray in three separate states: first, climbing the hill towards Ambition, who stands ready to crown him with laurels; second, being cast off the hillside through the thwarting of Ambition; and third, spread-eagled unconscious on the ground, mocked by Scorn and Infamy. On the reverse Blake adds his own gloss to Gray’s passage on the ultimate fate of human existence. At the top presides the bearded Urizen, a deity of Blake’s own devising who was the creator of the corrupt, rule-bound, materialistic world we inhabit. Trudging past Urizen are the sorry masses who follow him, now paying the ultimate price for submitting to his dominion, while to the left sits a figure corresponding to Gray’s “Queen of Death.”

Gallery label for Great British Watercolors from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art (Yale Center for British Art, 2008-06-09 - 2008-08-17)