Today, William Blake is remembered as one of the central figures of the Romantic period in England. Although he's celebrated as a poet (with such famous lines as "Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright, in the forests of the night..."), Blake also contributed to the art world as a painter and a printmaker, creating illustrations that were just as vivid and mythic as his written poetry.

Blake was born in London in 1757. His family belonged to a Nonconformist Christian sect, which would have an immense impact on the young artist's life. Blake studied engraving and became an apprentice, but in time, he developed his own method known as "relief etching" in 1788 (a process for raising a surface so that he could print text and illustrations together). Blake's fame soon spread and he was commissioned to produce numerous engravings for wealthy patrons and authors. He was working on illustrations for a new edition of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri when he died in 1827.

For someone like William Blake, poetry was something he could express both through the written word and the visual arts. He claimed to experience several dramatic visions in the course of his life, which tied into his appreciation of the Bible's natural poetry. Blake's etchings bring a poetic sense of realism, with his actual subjects being graphically bold for the time: demons making war in Heaven, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, and the Great Red Dragon from the Book of Revelation.

One of Blake's most famous watercolor paintings--and most illustrative of his style--is The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun. Inspired by the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation, we see in this artwork a hideous man-like dragon preparing to devour the child of the woman lying at his feet. Rather than put the holier woman at the center, Blake's focus is on the dragon itself. He puts immense graphical detail into the dragon's shape and body, turning mythical allegory into a horrifying reality. And while Blake himself was a far more radical Christian than most of his countrymen, he knew the English perspective well enough to create a suitably traditional religious work with his own dramatic flair. It is for these reasons that Guardian art correspondent Jonathan Jones calls William Blake "the essential British artist."

You can see some of William Blake's prints and illustrations at museums like the Tate Gallery in London, as well as in classic editions of such books as Paradise Lost, The Book of Job, and The Divine Comedy.

Image by Flam on Flickr