Blake in Glory

BLAKE IN GLORY 297 vivid exception to Paulson's and Gowing's commentary on the oil and the series, for these emphasize Hogarth's balance and detached lack of judgment on what he represents. In Shesgreen's reading, which I find persuasive, exactly the reverse is true; the Actresses is a fitting comment and conclusion for the Times. What can be the fate of a tribe whose tastes and morals, like those of the London populace, are so vitiated that there can be no hope for its salvation? ... The fate engulfing London and its population in Night [fire} already has begun to envelop the equally careless players and their barn world. ... The strolling players' announcement describes their evening's performance as 'Being the last time of Acting Before ye Act Commences' ... the performance they are now giving is indeed their final one. (P 154) The Actresses is, in every way, as Shesgreen calls it, the 'epilogue' (p 157) for the Times and the epilogue is not just an epilogue which calls attention to the evils of London. Rather it stresses their insubstantial home, the falsity of the artistic conventions from which they emerge. If the tickets, carefully pointed towards the series, makean introduction, the oil makes both the socialand the artisticcomment plain in a new scene. Both, as Shesgreen says, are 'works of art about other works of art.' As such, however, they are 'also prospective. They represent a self-conscious demonstration ofhow a theme threatened with fossilization may be revitalized ... fruitful imitation is possible and moribund imagery may be resuscitated when a tradition and its conventions are properly understood and reinterpreted' (p 157). Both volumes, then, represent contributions to our reading of Hogarth, not least the fact that he must be read, in individual pictures, in series and in terms of his own tacit instructions, as well as for the relations between parts of the series and allusive references to other series that Shesgreen describes. They also raise the real and perhaps insuperable problem of the looking which is part of the reading. Without clear and well-disposed illustrations, perceptive discussion can be lost or left theoretically only in words, the last thing our authors would want. Blake in Glory G.E. BENTLEY, JR David Bindman. William Blake His Art and Times Catalogue of an exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art and at the Art Gallery of Ontario London, New Haven, Toronto: Yale Center for British Art, Art Gallery of Ontario 1982.192.223 plates (including 22 in colour). $15.00 paper. 'Katherine A. Lochnan, Curator of Prints and Drawings [at the Art Gallery of Ontario} ... originally conceived the exhibition with David Bindman' (p 8), but the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1985 298 G.E. BENTLEY, JR work of the catalogue is largely that of Bindman, a very distinguished British art historian. He was responsible for the great Blake exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1970 (including a catalogue of its entire Blake collection and of that of Sir Geoffrey Keynes laterwilled to it) and for the exhibition in Hamburg in 1975; he made an extraordinary edition (really reproductions) ofall ofBlake's Graphic Works (1978), and he is the author ofone ofthe mostimportantand comprehensivebooks on William Blake as an Artist (1977). Only two other men have done as much to exhibit Blake's art in the last forty years, the late Sir Geoffrey Keynes and Martin Butlin, whose exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1978 is probably the most important ever to have been held in Britain. In a sense this is an international exhibition, for the thirty-two lenders come from England, the United States, and even Canada, and the only major Blake collection not represented is that of the Huntington Library, which is not allowed to loan works. The exhibition includes works from almost all the great Blake collections: the British Museum, the Tate Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in England, the Rosenwald Collections, the Pierpont Morgan Library, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and the New York Public Library in the United States, but it is primarily a celebration of the glories of the Blake Collection of...