1725
NOVEMBER 21.  Birth of Catherine Wright, the poet’s mother, daughter of Gervas & Mary Wright of Walkeringham, Nottinghamshire.

1746
DECEMBER 14.  Marriage of Catherine Wright to Thomas Armitage at St. George’s Chapel, Mayfair.  They have one son, also Thomas.

1750
NOVEMBER 26.  Catherine Wright received into the Congregation of the Lamb (Fetter Lane Moravian Church).

1751
FEBRUARY.  Death of Thomas, son of Thomas & Catherine Armitage.
MARCH 1.  Burial of Thomas Armitage, Jr., at Bloomsbury burial ground.
NOVEMBER 19.  Death of Thomas Armitage.
NOVEMBER 23.  Burial of Thomas Armitage at Bloomsbury Ground.

1752
OCTOBER 15.  Marriage of the widowed Catherine Armitage to James Blake at the Mayfair Chapel.  James Blake was a “moderately prosperous hosier” (Gilchrist). 

1753
JULY 10.  Birth of James, the first child of James & Catherine Blake.
JULY 15.  James Blake baptised at the family church, St. James’s, Piccadilly.

1755
MAY 12.  Birth of John Blake. 
JUNE 1.  John baptised at St. James’s, Piccadilly (died young).

1757
NOVEMBER 28.  William, the second surviving son of James & Catherine Blake, born at his parents’ home, 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, Soho (Gilchrist).
DECEMBER 11.  William Blake baptised at St. James’s Church, Piccadilly.

1760
MARCH 20.  Birth of John Blake, second of that name.
MARCH 31.  John baptised at St. James’s, Piccadilly.

1761
William Blake, at age 4, sees a vision of God’s head in a window.  He did not attend school but was educated at home, primarily by his mother.

1762
APRIL 25.  Catherine Sophia Boucher, later William’s wife, born.
MAY 16.  Catherine Sophia baptised at St. Mary’s, Battersea.
JUNE 19.  Birth of Robert Blake, the poet’s youngest & favourite brother.
JULY 11.  Baptised as “Richard,” at St. James’s, Piccadilly.

1764
JANUARY 7.  Birth of Catherine Elizabeth, William’s only sister.
JANUARY 28.  Catherine Elizabeth Blake baptised at St. James’s, Piccadilly.

1767
Aged 10, entered William Shipley’s Academy in the Strand, a drawing school continued by Henry Pars after 1768 (Gilchrist).  His teachers may have included Richard Cosway.  In the late 1760s, while walking across Peckham Rye near London, he saw a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings “bespangling every bough like stars” (Gilchrist).

1769
At the age of twelve began writing the poems included in Poetical Sketches (printed 1783) (Gilchrist).

1772
AUGUST 4.  Apprenticed to the engraver, James Basire, 1730-1802, of 31 Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for a period of seven years (Gilchrist).

1773
Blake’s first engraving: “Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion”, based on a figure in Michelangelo’s Crucifixion of St.  Peter.

1774
Sent out by Basire to make drawings from old buildings & monuments, in particular Westminster Abbey (Gilchrist).
MAY.  Blake sketches “The Body of Edward I in his Coffin” (Gilchrist).

1779
OCTOBER 8.  On completion of his apprenticeship, Blake was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools at Somerset House as an engraver (Gilchrist).  Fellow students were John Flaxman, 1756-1826, Thomas Stothard, 1755-1834, & George Cumberland, 1754-1848.

1780
Begins commercial engraving for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson.
MAY.  Exhibits at the Royal Academy, Somerset House, for the first time.  The work is an historical design in watercolour, “The Death of Earl Goodwin” (Gilchrist).  Exhibits subsequently in 1784, 1785, 1799, 1800 & 1809.
JUNE 6.  Blake is borne along by the mob who liberated Newgate Prison in the Gordon Riots (Gilchrist).
SEPTEMBER? Arrested as French spies with Stothard & others while on a sketching trip by boat up the Medway.  Released on assurances from members of the Royal Academy.

1782
AUGUST 18.  At St Mary’s Battersea, Blake marries Catherine Butcher, or Boucher, daughter of a market gardener (Gilchrist).  They move to 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields, not far from where Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy, lives (Gilchrist).

1783
John Flaxman & the Revd. A. S. Mathew finance the printing of Blake’s Poetical Sketches (Gilchrist).  Engraved 9 plates after Stothard for Ritson’s English Song.

1784
APRIL 26.  Flaxman writes to William Hayley stating that he is sending him a copy of Blake’s Poetical Sketches.
MAY.  Exhibited “A Breach in a City Wall” & “War Unchained by an Angel, Fire and Pestilence and Famine Following” at the Royal Academy, Somerset House.
JULY 4.  Blake’s father James dies & is buried in the Dissenter’s burying ground, Bunhill Fields (Gilchrist).  A small inheritance from his father enables Blake to set up a print shop at 27 Broad Street, in partnership with James Parker who was a fellow apprentice at Basire’s (Gilchrist).  Blake took his younger brother Robert to live with him as assistant & pupil.

1785
MAY.  Four works shown at the Royal Academy, Somerset House, three illustrations to the biblical story of “Joseph” & “The Bard from Gray”.  The critic in the Daily Universal Register thought that in the latter the bard “appears like some lunatic”.
AUTUMN.  Partnership with James Parker dissolved (Gilchrist).
The Blakes moved to a house near his birthplace, 28 Poland Street (Gilchrist).

1787
Robert’s final illness.  Blake looked after him continuously “without sleep” for the last two weeks of his life (Gilchrist).
FEBRUARY 11.  Robert died in Blake’s arms at 28 Poland Street & was buried near his father in Bunhill Fields.

1788
Began associating with the radical circle of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, & Joseph Johnson.  Met the painter Henry Fuseli, or Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1741-1825, with whom he had some spiritual affinity.  For the rest of his life, Blake had a close, spiritual relationship with Robert (Gilchrist).  “I converse daily & hourly in the Spirit & See him in my remembrance in the regions of my Imagination.  I hear his advice & even now write from his Dictate.”  Blake claimed that the appearance of Robert to him in one of his “visionary imaginations” led to the idea of relief etching in copper for printing his poetry (Gilchrist).  Produces his first works using his method of relief etched illuminated printing: There is No Natural Religion & All Religions are One, though these were not printed until 1794 5.  Engraves the Songs of Innocence by the new process (Gilchrist).

1789
Tiriel, consisting of a manuscript poem & a series of twelve illustrations, is usually dated to this year.  Publishes his first major independent works, Songs of Innocence & The Book of Thel.
APRIL 13.  William & Catherine were among those signing a declaration that they believed in the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg at the first session of the New Jerusalem Church, but they never actually became members.

1790
AUTUMN.  William & Catherine move across the Thames to 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth (Gilchrist).

1791
The first book of Blake’s unfinished poem in seven books, The French Revolution, is printed for Joseph Johnson but in view of the political situation is abandoned.  Only one set of page proofs survives.  Six engravings after Blake’s designs appeared in a new edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s book Original Stories from Real Life, Johnson, 1791, & 10 plates for Darwin’s Botanic Garden, Johnson, 1791 (Gilchrist).

1792
SEPTEMBER 9.  Blake’s mother Catherine died & was buried near her husband & son at Bunhill Fields.

1793
Publishes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, begun 1790, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America.  Engraved 12 plates for Gay’s Fables, Stockdale, 1793.  Produces the Gates of Paradise (Gilchrist).
OCTOBER 10.  Blake’s Prospectus of works for sale lists engravings & illuminated books for sale or in hand.

1794
Date on the title pages of Songs of Experience, Europe a Prophecy, The First Book of Urizen.
SEPTEMBER 27.  The antiquary & traveller Richard Twiss advises his friend Francis Douce that Blake’s work can be seen at Johnson’s bookshop in St. Paul’s Churchyard.

1795
Date on the title pages of The Song of Los, The Book of Ahania, The Book of Los.  Designs & produces the twelve large colour monotypes.  Some of these can be firmly dated to 1795, though others, despite having a date 1795 on them, were printed in the early 1800s.

1796
Illustrates G.  A.  Burger’s Leonora (Gilchrist).  Publication of J.  G.  Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Year’s Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.  Publication of his friend George Cumberland’s Thoughts on Outline with eight plates engraved by Blake.  Probably began work on the manuscript Vala or The Four Zoas, which he continues to work on until c.  1807.

1796 7
Engraved 43 of his own designs for Young’s Night Thoughts, Richard Edwards, 1797, in folio.

1797
Commissioned by John Flaxman to illustrate Thomas Gray’s Poems for his wife Ann, “Nancy”, with 116 designs.  Signs a testimonial recommending Alexander Tilloch’s method to prevent banknote forgeries.

1799
In 1799 Flaxman introduced Blake to the minor poet & writer William Hayley, who thought he might benefit both Blake & himself by bringing him to live in the same village in Sussex to engrave plates for Hayley’s Life of William Cowper.
MAY.  Exhibited his first “tempera” painting, “The Last Supper”, at the Royal Academy.
AUGUST.  First documented work for Thomas Butts, c.1757 1845, Blake’s most important patron.  Butts’s patronage of Blake, which included commissions for many Bible illustrations, was crucial to his survival as an artist for the next twenty years.

1800
Blake makes annotations to Boyd’s 1785 translation of Dante’s Inferno at about this time.  Engraved 10 plates for Salzmann’s Gymnastics for Youth, Johnson, 1800.
MAY.  Exhibited a tempera painting of “The Loaves and Fishes” at the Royal Academy. 
SEPTEMBER 18.  William & Catherine Blake left Lambeth for a cottage near William Hayley’s house at Felpham, near Chichester, Sussex—the only time he lived outside London (Gilchrist).  During a three year stay Blake painted a series of eighteen “Heads of Poets” for Hayley’s library.
OCTOBER 5.  Publication of Hayley’s “Little Tom the Sailor” with engravings by Blake.

1801
JULY 31.  Flaxman passes on to Blake the Revd. J. Thomas’s commission for illustrations to Milton’s “Comus” & the works of Shakespeare.

1802
Engraved 14 of his own designs for Hayley’s Designs to a Series of Ballads, Blake, 1802. 

1802 4
Engraved 6 of his own designs for Hayley’s Life …of William Cowper, Johnson, 1803 4.

1803
The cottage was damp & Mrs.  Blake’s health suffered.  Determined “to be no longer Pesterd with [Hayley’s] Genteel Ignorance & Polite Approbation” William decides to leave Felpham. 
Engraved 6 plates after Maria Flaxman for Hayley’s Triumphs of Temper, Cadell & Davies, 1803.
AUGUST 12.  Blake ejected a drunken soldier named John Scofield from his Felpham cottage garden, having ‘uttered seditious and treasonable expressions, such as “D_n the King, d_n all his subjects”‘ (Gilchrist).
AUGUST 15.  Private Scofield laid a formal Complaint that Blake had committed sedition.
SEPTEMBER 19.  Returned to London, at first to his brother’s house, 28 Broad Street, but by October 26 had settled at 17 South Molton Street (Gilchrist).  The house still survives.
OCTOBER 4.  A True Bill was found against Blake at his trial at the Quarter Sessions, Petworth, Sussex.

1804
Date on title-pages of Milton, completed 1808 or later, & Jerusalem, completed 1820.  Possible date for beginning of watercolours of Job for Thomas Butts. 
JANUARY 11.  Blake was acquitted of sedition at his trial at the Guildhall, Chichester (Gilchrist).
OCTOBER? Visit to the Truchsessian Gallery.  Blake was suddenly “enlightened” after 20 years of darkness.

1805
Commissioned by Robert Hartley Cromek to illustrate Robert Blair’s poem The Grave (Gilchrist).  Second edition of Hayley’s Ballads with illustrations by Blake.  Engraved 5 plates after his own designs for Hayley’s Ballads, Phillips, 1805, & 3 after Flaxman for The Iliad, Longman, 1805.  Begins tutoring Tommy Butts at £26. 5s. 0d per annum.
NOVEMBER.  Commission for etching Blake’s designs for Blair’s Grave transferred abruptly from Blake to Schiavonetti.

1806
Benjamin Heath Malkin’s A Father’s Memoirs of His Child, which contains the earliest account of Blake’s career.

1807
Executed first set of illustrations for Milton’s Paradise Lost for Revd. Joseph Thomas.
MAY.  Portrait of Blake by Thomas Phillips exhibited at the Royal Academy.

1808
Produces the set of twelve illustrations to Milton’s Paradise Lost for Thomas Butts.  Annotates Reynolds’s Discourses around this time.  Produces “A Vision of the Last Judgment” commissioned by the Countess of Egremont in 1807.  Made first set of designs for Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”.
MAY.  “Jacob’s Dream” & “Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by Angels” exhibited at the Royal Academy (Gilchrist).
JULY.  Blake’s 8 illustrations to Robert Blair’s The Grave published by Cromek, with Blake’s designs engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti & a frontispiece after Phillips’s portrait.
AUGUST 7, NOVEMBER.  Savage reviews of Blake’s Grave designs by Robert Hunt in The Examiner & in the Antijacobin Review.

1809
MAY.  Opening of Blake’s exhibition of his own work, accompanied by his Descriptive Catalogue, at 28 Broad Street, the house of his brother James.  The exhibition included “Sir Jeffery Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims on their journey to Canterbury” & “The Bard from Gray” (Gilchrist).
SEPTEMBER 17.  The critic Robert Hunt, having seen the show, described Blake in the periodical The Examiner as “an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement.” Although scheduled to close on 29 SEPTEMBER, the exhibition was still open in JUNE 1810.

1810
Wrote his “Vision of the Last Judgment”.
APRIL 28.  Henry Crabb Robinson visited Blake’s exhibition, & took Charles Lamb there on June 11.
OCTOBER.  Blake’s engraving after his painting “Sir Jeffery Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims” published.  Stothard’s rival painting caused a breach in their friendship.

1811
Henry Crabb Robinson’s essay entitled “William Blake, Künstler, Dichter, und Religiöser Schwärmer” [Artist, Poet & Religious Mystic], published in the first issue of Vaterländisches Museum, Hamburg.

1812
Showed “Sir Jeffrey Chaucer and Twenty seven Pilgrims”, the “Spiritual Forms” of Pitt & Nelson, & plates from Jerusalem at the exhibition of the Associated Painters in Water Colours.

1814
Begins engraving designs for Hesiod.
JUNE 3.  Blake’s fellow student & a long-suffering supporter, George Cumberland, remarked that Blake was “still poor still Dirty”.  A year later, his two sons found Blake & his wife “drinking Tea durtyer than ever …  His time is now intirely taken up with Etching & engraving.”

1815
Six illustrations to John Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”.
JUNE.  The probable date of Blake’s visit to the Royal Academy to copy the cast of the “Laocoön” for Abraham Rees’s Cyclopædia.
SUMMER & AUTUMN.  Engraved 18 plates of pottery for Wedgwood’s catalogue.

1816
Blake is included in A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland.  Begins 12 designs for Paradise Regained.  Designs for L’Allegro & for Il Penseroso.

1817
The critic William Paulet Carey, writing about the President of the Royal Academy Benjamin West, praised Blake’s illustrations to The Grave & regretted Blake’s lack of success, “one of those highly gifted men, who owe the vantage ground of their fame, solely to their own powers”.  He reported that there had been some doubt as to whether Blake was alive.  Hesiod is published with 37 stippled plates by Blake after Flaxman.

1818
A revised version of For Children: The Gates of Paradise, 1793, is produced probably at this time, entitled For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise.
FEBRUARY.  Songs of Innocence and of Experience praised by poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
JUNE.  John Linnell, 1792-1837, is introduced to Blake by George Cumberland’s son, George.  Linnell becomes an important patron & supporter of Blake. 
SEPTEMBER 12 or earlier.  Linnell introduces the watercolourist & astrologer John Varley, 1778-1842, & the artist John Constable, 1776-1837, to Blake.  Blake also meets through Linnell the artists Samuel Palmer, George Richmond & Edward Calvert, who later form “The Ancients” (Gilchrist).

1819
OCTOBER 14.  First dated examples of the “visionary heads”, including The Ghost of a Flea, drawn by Blake for Varley (Gilchrist).

1820
On Homer’s Poetry; On Virgil, a single relief-etched plate.  First copies of Jerusalem dating from this period.

1821
Dr.  Thornton’s Pastorals of Virgil are published, containing Blake’s wood-engravings, his first & last attempt at woodcutting (Gilchrist).  The Blakes move to a two room top floor flat at 3 Fountain Court, Strand (Gilchrist).  Blake & his wife were so destitute that he was forced to sell the print collection that he had amassed since childhood to Colnaghi, a London print dealer, holding on only to his copy of Dürer’s Melancholia.

1822
Blake produced a short illustrated verse drama, The Ghost of Abel, a Revelation in the Visions of Jehovah Seen by William Blake.
JUNE 28.  Received a donation from the Royal Academy Council: “Because of his continuing hardships,” the Royal Academy paid Blake, “an able designer & Engraver labouring under great distress,” the sum of twenty-five pounds (Gilchrist).

1823
MARCH.  Blake & Linnell signed a Memorandum of agreement for Blake to engrave & Linnell to publish the engraving of the Book of Job.  Blake produced a set of small-scale sketches, mostly in pencil with some coloured wash, for the twenty-one scenes actually engraved.  The Job series, “thanks to a staunch friend, proves a means of subsistence when all others fail,” (Gilchrist).
AUGUST 1.  Blake has his life mask taken by the phrenologist James Deville, “as representative of the imaginative faculty”.

1824
John Linnell commissions Blake to produce illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy & also engravings after them.  Between 1824 & 1827 he produces 102 designs & 7 engravings, at various stages of completion, & a number of associated drawings. 

1825
Blake met Charles Aders, 1780-1846, an important pioneer collector of medieval & early renaissance art.  Aders is recorded as purchasing a proof set of the “Job” engravings for five guineas in July 1826.  He also owned a copy of The Songs of Innocence.
APRIL 17.  Henry Fuseli dies.
OCTOBER.  Blake took a proof copy of “Job” to John Flaxman, who admired it & subscribed to a copy.
DECEMBER 10.  Henry Crabb Robinson met Blake at a party at the Aderses. 

1826
Two watercolours, the “Wise & Foolish Virgins” & “Queen Catherine’s Dream”, sold to Sir Thomas Lawrence.  Undertakes his last great enterprise—the Dante Series commissioned by Linnell—& works at it persistently in failing health (Gilchrist).  Engraved 7 of his 101 Dante designs.
MARCH.  Publication of the Illustrations of the Book of Job, dated 1825.
DECEMBER 7.  John Flaxman dies.

1827
MARCH 2.  Blake’s brother James died & was buried in Bunhill Fields, near his parents & brother.
AUGUST 12, 6 p.m.  William Blake dies at 3 Fountain Court as he has lived, like a saint (Gilchrist).  The young artist George Richmond wrote that “just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened, and he burst out into singing of the things he saw in heaven” (Gilchrist). 
AUGUST 14.  The artist John Constable was “much concerned at the death of poor Mr Blake” & hoped that the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution would help Catherine.
AUGUST 17.  Blake was buried near his parents & brothers at Bunhill Fields (Gilchrist).  There were obituaries in the Literary Gazette, Monthly Magazine, Gentleman’s Magazine, New Monthly Magazine, Annual Biography & Obituary, & Annual Register.
SEPTEMBER 11.  Catherine Blake becomes Linnell’s housekeeper at Cirencester Place.

1828
MARCH or JUNE.  Catherine Blake moved again to 20 Lisson Grove as Frederick Tatham’s housekeeper.

1831
Catherine Blake lived by herself at 17 Charlton Street.
OCTOBER 18.  Death of Catherine Blake. 
OCTOBER 20.  Catherine Blake buried at Bunhill Fields.

1831 3
Tatham quarrelled with Linnell about the ownership of Blake’s Dante designs.

1841
MARCH 9.  Death of Blake’s sister, Catherine Elizabeth Blake.

Last modified 28/03/2008 22:37.