Blake, John Martin, and the illustration ofParadise Lost

Abstract

Abstract Paradise Lost's central importance to subsequent literary history has long been recognized; yet the complex. By approaching the relationship between Milton's epic and its illustrations through a highly localized study - less than twenty years separate the two specific sets of designs under discussion - I have inevitably raised questions that have not been directly dealt with here. Any discussion of the process of illustration, with its intimate and dynamic juxtaposition of image and text, necessarily brings into play broad theoretical questions about the ‘Sister Arts’ which demand much fuller treatment than can be given in an article of this length.1 This piece arose out of a seminar given at Harvard by Richard Wendorf, which explored such questions in the context of British Art between Hogarth and Turner. I am most grateful to Professor Wendorf and the other members of the group for their challenging and stimulating discussions on the issues at hand in this article. It would be equally impossible to exhaust the possibilities for detailed interpretation - ‘close reading’ - offered by the two sets of illustrations that I propose to talk about here. I do not claim, therefore, that my conclusions constitute either a model of the way illustration works or a full reading of Blake's twelve watercolours and Martin's twenty-four mezzotints. My initial aim is to use these two sets of Paradise Lost illustrations to question and complicate some commonplace assumptions about the translation of text into image, assumptions that seem to have governed most of the critical writing about these particular pictures. However, I have gone on to suggest some ways in which my revision of the critical approach to these specific works might have wider implications, revealing something about both the aesthetic qualities of the pictures and the nature of Romantic critical practice. Paradise Lost presents its would-be illustrators with unique problems, a fact that criticism has largely overlooked; but Blake's and Martin's responses to the Miltonic challenge involve them in a radical imaginative project which can be seen to redefine the very activity of illustration. Just as the poem forces artists to revise the relation of image to text, so by unravelling that revision it becomes possible for us in turn to reconsider the criteria by which we examine the illustrative process.