Visions of History

Abstract

The struggle between Los’s true faith — the ancient poetry of the prophetic bards — and the false dogma of Druidism dominates the final plates of Jerusalem, scattered as they are with the fragments of a primordial British architecture. Yet though Blake wrote little after Jerusalem, his friendship with the younger painter John Varley (1778–1842) led to a series of unusual drawings which were a result of the occult interests of that painter, and provided Blake with an opportunity of redepicting some of his previous ideas in a not altogether sombre manner. Bentley describes these pictures, the ‘visionary heads’, as the result of ‘midnight séances’ begun circa 14 October 1819 (the date on the reverse of a portrait of Richard I, one of the earliest in the series) and Butlin notes that they may have been intended to humour the credulous Varley or even been actual eidetic visions.¹ Linnell was commissioned to copy some of the drawings and Blake, as well as producing visions in extempore in one of Varley’s notebooks, reworked other portraits which had aroused his interest.