Blake’s Newton, Line-Drawing, and Geometry

Notwithstanding the implication of geometry and diagrams in William Blake’s antagonistic reception of Newtonianism, the artist’s own ‘practical aesthetics’ of line-drawing bear comparison with the theories and methods of contemporary and earlier practical geometers. This article begins and ends with a reading of Blake’s colour-print Newton (ca. 1805), suggesting two new possible sources for the diagram it represents (Samuel Cunn’s edition of Euclid’s Elements and Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia), and interpreting the diagram’s dynamic placement as disclosing a knowing critique of geometrical abstraction, laying bare and potentially celebrating the mechanics (superposition) at its heart.