First published in 1838 and then reprinted in 1892, Blake’s Illustrations to Dante groups together in one volume English artist William Blake’s (1757-1827) seven engraved illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Blake was commissioned to produce the illustrations by his friend and patron, the painter John Linnell (1792-1882), in the summer of 1824, and he worked on them until his death in 1827 (Phillips 2014, 207; Paley 2004, 110).
In total, Blake produced 102 drawing, extant today in various states of completion, 72 of which illustrate the Inferno, 20 the Purgatorio, and 10 the Paradiso (Phillips 2014, 207). He does not seem to have executed his illustrations in any particular order: Morton D. Paley notes that “for the various parts of the Comedy there exist some drawings that are pencil sketches and others that are completely finished watercolours” (Paley 2004, 110). Blake relied on two editions of the Divine Comedy to inform his illustrations, the Henry Francis Cary translation of 1814 (Blake’s primary reference text and the standard English translation of the poem at the time) and an Italian edition with Alessandro Vellutello’s (b. 1473) commentary (Paley 2004, 111).
The seven illustrations Blake chose to engrave into copper, and which are reproduced in the book described here, are all from the Inferno: Michael Phillips notes that in some of the plates, “such as plate 1 (Paolo and Francesca in the Circle of the Lustful), the engraving is partly completed: some areas are clearly finished, while in others it is hardly begun” (Phillips 2014, 213; see also Paley 2004, 115). Blake used drypoint to sketch his designs into copper, and by the end of April 1827 he had made proofs of six out of seven plates and readied the seventh design for engraving; work on this seventh engraving, which in the book corresponds to plate 3 (the “Baffled Devils Fighting”), was interrupted by the artist’s death four months later (ibid). The engravings subsequently fell into Linnell’s possession, who published them in 1838 “without change” (Phillips 2014, 213; Bentley and Nurmi 1964, 88). The plates were later reprinted in 1892, and then again in 1955 (Bentley and Nurmi 1964, 89).
McGill University’s copy is from either 1838 or 1892 (Lawrence Lande William Blake Collection 1983, 41); as the book is unmarked by publication information, with even the title only appearing on the spine, it is difficult to determine to which print run it belongs. The copy was donated to the McGill Library by Lawrence Montague Lande (1906-1998), a noted Canadian bibliophile and one of the most important benefactors to the McGill Library of the mid-twentieth century, in 1953. It is currently held in McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections Lawrence Lande Blake Collection.
Full Title: Blake's Illustrations to Dante.
Author: William Blake (1757-1827).
Contents: Reproductions of Blake’s illustrations to Inferno V (plate 1), XXII (plate 2 and 3), XXV (plates 4 and 5), XXIX (plate 6), and XXXII (plate 7).
Date of Publication: 1838 or 1892.
Place of Publication: London, U.K.
Publisher / Printer: N/A.
Languages: English.
Physical Description: 7 unnumbered leaves of plates, all illustrations, measuring 420 x 560 mm. The seven engraved illustrations are printed on India paper and mounted on drawing paper. The illustrations are loose in binding of red half-morocco with marbled end-papers; each is accompanied by a mat bound in (Lawrence Lande William Blake Collection 1983, 41).
Call Number: McGill Rare Books and Special Collections, Lawrence Lande Blake Collection, Blake 2.1 B4 I42 1800z elf.
Catalogue: https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/61581273
Digitization: https://archive.org/details/McGillLibrary-rbsc_blake-illustrations-dante_Blake2-1_B4I421800zelf-20470
Previous Owners: Lawrence Montague Lande (1906-1998); Clarence S. Bemens (?).
Ex-libris and Stamps: Armorial bookplate of Clarence S. Bemens on front paste-down.
History of this Copy: It is unknown whether this particular copy of Blake’s Illustrations to Dante is one of the fifty original sets of proofs commissioned by William Blake’s friend and patron, John Linnell (1792-1882), in 1838, or if it is instead one of the 1892 reprints. The book entered the McGill Library Special Collections in 1953 along with 249 other William Blake items (including first, early, and variant editions of Blake’s literary works and book illustrations, facsimiles of Blake’s coloured works, original engravings by Blake and his school, and editions of Blake’s works produced by his friends and followers) that were donated by Lawrence Lande and form the nucleus of the since much expanded Lawrence Lande Blake Collection (Lawrence Lande William Blake Collection 1983). Lande was a notable bibliophile and one of the most important mid-twentieth-century benefactors to the McGill Library. Aside from the Blake Collection, which through regular additions has grown from a few hundred to a few thousand items, Lande is also well-known for collecting Canadiana for the McGill Library during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as donating a smaller collection of fine editions of literary classics (including editions containing Dante’s poetry). Prior to Lande, this copy of Blake’s Illustrations to Dante presumably belonged to one Clarence S. Bemens, as indicated by the elaborate armorial bookplate on the front paste-down, but little information is available about this person -- only a paper trail of bookplates, pasted in various books across multiple institutional library collections, with no further identifying details.
Notes: Neither the place and date of publication nor the publisher are specified anywhere on McGill’s copy, so it is difficult to ascertain whether McGill owns one of the fifty original sets of proofs commissioned by John Linnell in 1838 or one of the 1892 reprints. Both print runs, however, were produced in London, England according to Gerald Eades Bentley’s and Martin K. Nurmi’s A Blake Bibliography (1964), so it is reasonable to infer London as the place of publication for McGill’s copy of the book as well.
Bibliography
Bentley, Gerald Eades and Martin K. Nurmi. 1964. A Blake Bibliography: Annotated Lists of Works, Studies, and Blakeana. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 88-89.
Lawrence Lande William Blake Collection. 1983. A Catalogue of the Lawrence Lande William Blake Collection in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of the McGill University Libraries. Annotations written or verified by Christopher Heppner. Montreal: McLennan Library.
Paley, Morton D. 2004. The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Phillips, Michael. 2014. William Blake: Apprentice & Master. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum.
Author and date of the record: Cay Rivard, 24/06/2021.
