Signing Large Color Prints: The Significance of Blake's Signatures

Among William Blake's greatest achievements as both painter and printmaker are his large monoprints of 1795. Blake produced thirty-three mono prints of twelve designs, twenty-nine of which are extant. He signed at least twenty, using five different formats, but is thought to have sold only eleven, all to Thomas Butts. The present essay sequences the signatures and argues that Blake also sold nine monoprints to three collectors between 1806 and 1810, that he sold his first monoprints to Butts by mid-1796, that he printed designs in a heretofore unknown printing session in ca. 1795–96, and that, around 1807, he changed his idea about the monoprint, from large color print to a new kind of painting. The monoprints reveal that Blake's general practice was to sign artworks not upon execution or completion, but upon sale.