Revolution and Nightmare

William Blake

Newton

1795–c. 1805

Color print, ink and watercolor on paper, 46 × 60 cm. Tate, London

A muscular nude scientist sits hunched on a rock, drawing with compasses on a sheet at his feet. Blake turns the hero of the Enlightenment into a man shut inside his own diagram.

• First shown in public at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, in 1876, long after Blake's death.
• Look at the murky green setting and the patterned rock, which the Tate catalogue reads as a scene under water.
• The pose comes from Michelangelo's Abias in the Sistine Chapel, which Blake knew from an engraving.
• Blake's attack on Newton is an early sign of a lasting Romantic distrust of science that reduces the living world to measurement.
• Presented to the Tate by W. Graham Robertson in 1939.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain (PD-Art)