In 1809 London’s art lovers could visit a one-man exhibition of ‘Poetical and Historical Inventions’ by the engraver, visionary poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827). The show was held in the upstairs rooms of his brother’s hosiery shop in Golden Square, Soho. Inside were sixteen paintings in watercolour and tempera. Visitors were charged two shilling and sixpence, for which they also received a 66-page pamphlet entitled A Descriptive Catalogue, in which Blake discussed the pictures and his ambitions as an artist.

Blake hoped the exhibition would launch him as a painter of large-scale public schemes, what he termed ‘the Grand style of art’. But almost no-one came to the exhibition, and even his friends were baffled by his strange descriptions of his pictures. Only one review appeared at the time. Blake was bitterly disappointed, becoming increasingly withdrawn and depressed.

Exactly two centuries later, ten of the surviving pictures are exhibited here. The missing works, including a large-scale painting of ‘The Ancient Britons’, are represented by blank spaces. Pictures by other artists exhibited during 1809 are also shown, giving a sense of what was different about Blake’s exhibition – and why contemporaries may have found his work so strange and confusing.

Blake’s Exhibition

No 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, where Blake held his exhibition, was an ordinary London town house and shop. Blake had grown up at this address; his father kept a hosiery shop there (selling stockings and underwear). By 1809 Blake’s older brother James was running the business. The upstairs space where the exhibition was held was a living area; the pictures must have been shown in cramped conditions and the lighting may have been poor. The strangeness of Blake’s pictures must have been all the more alarming in these conditions. Only a handful of people left any record of visiting the exhibition. Sadly, the fullest report was also the most critical. The radical newspaper The Examiner was brutal:

the poor man fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are unintelligible allegory, others an attempt at sober character by caricature representation, and the whole ‘blotted and blurred’ and very badly drawn. These he calls an Exhibition, of which he has published a Catalogue, or rather a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain

Today, Blake is considered one of the greatest of British artists. The reception of the 1809 exhibition is a reminder of how dramatically reputations may change over time.

This display has been devised by curator Martin Myrone

BP British Art Displays 1500-2009

William Blake’s 1809 exhibition is at Tate Britain from 20 April to 4 October 2009, admission is free