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Updated post from October 12, 2012

Yale Center for British Art
Portrait of William Blake
engraved by Charles H. Jeens

This portrait of Blake from the Yale Center for British Art was engraved by Charles H. Jeens from a painting from life by Blake's friend John Linnell. The portrait was used as the frontispiece of The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist (pub. 1863).
 
We welcome your visit to our blog and invite you to spend some time with us. Although we try to share our understanding of Blake with our guests, we are most interested in making available to you the tools to study Blake independently. The links that are provided in almost every post connect you with sites, articles and individuals which have information and insight to share. We recommend books which have enriched our understanding of Blake: some of which you may read online, others which may be borrowed through your library's interlibrary loan system, or others may be purchased new or used through online services such as Better World Books.
 
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake edited by David V Erdman is available as a html document which can be downloaded to your computer. The passages from Blake which we print are usually from this file and the page numbers (E xxx) refer to it.
 
The pictures we include come from many sources. The Blake Archive acts a repository for a large and increasing volume of Blake's images but restricts the use to viewing and linking only. We do not post pictures retrieved from the Blake Archive. Other institutions allow the use of their images since they are all long out of copyright. Many of our images come from the Library of Congress Rosenwald Collection. Both the British Museum and Yale University, which have large holdings, are sources of images we are allowed to post. Wikimedia Commons presents a wide variety of Blake images which we use freely. We have also used many images from a site called the Complete Works which is advertising copies of paintings for sale. A large number of institutions have Blake works which are rarely seen; some have been digitized and made available for copying. It is far more possible for the public to view and use Blake images now than it was just a few years ago.
 
Our blog now has over 1700 posts which are archived and sometimes indexed. The search box at top left of the blog allows you to search for specific terms of phrases (enclosed in quotes). Resources which may help your studies are linked in the sidebar and heading.
 
We hope you have found something here which you are looking for. The study and enjoyment of Blake offers many possibilities. We welcome suggestions on how to improve our blog and better meet the needs of our readers. 
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