William Blake: Romantic visionary

Seeing the world in a way that made his contemporaries think him mad, Blake was a minor figure in his own time. Today, as Danny Bird reveals, he's regarded as one of Britain's greatest-ever artists and poets

- Danny Bird

When William Blake was just four years old, he saw God appear in a window. A few years later, he came across a tree teeming with angels on Peckham Rye. Visions such as these were an everyday occurrence for Blake, a man whose work blurred the barrier between lived reality and the spiritual plane. Largely overlooked during his lifetime and even dismissed as insane, Blake has latterly come to be seen as one of the foremost figures of the Romantic Age. It's a reputation that rests both on the extraordinary imagery of his art and on his resonant poetry.

Born on 28 November 1757 in a room above his father's hosiery shop in Soho, London, Blake's parents, James and Catherine, were religious dissenters (Protestants opposed to the Church of England). He grew up in modest circumstances, receiving a rudimentary education at his mother's knee - commonplace at the time and something the older Blake regarded as crucial to developing an unfettered imagination. In 1772, he was apprenticed to the engraver James Basire and learned his craft by sketching the monuments inside Westminster Abbey.

INSPIRATION FROM ABOVE