William Blake, Portrait of William Cowper, after George Romney, 1802, engraving.
Inscription: ‘From a Portrait in Crayons Drawn from the Life by Romney in 1792 Engraved by W Blake 1802 / WILLIAM COWPER / Carmine Nobilem / Hor: / Publish’d Novembr 5. 1802 by J. Johnson, St Pauls Church Yard’
William Blake engraved this portrait of William Cowper for the 1803 biography of the poet written by William Hayley. The print is after a pastel sketch by George Romney (now in the National Portrait Gallery in London) owned by Hayley and prized by him as a record of his friendship with Cowper. It was made in August 1792 while Cowper was visiting him at his house in Eartham. Before making the engraving, Blake had, according to Hayley, made a copy of Romney’s portrait in miniature. Four versions in miniature of Romney’s Cowper portrait by Blake exist, including one in the Ashmoleancollection in Oxford. Another portrait of Cowper, by Thomas Lawrence, was owned by Cowper’s cousin Harriet Lady Hesketh, and was also engraved by Blake for this edition.
The Latin epigram on the print comes from Horace’s Ode To Melpomene, the muse of song and of tragedy (Odes, IV, iii): ‘fingent Aeolio carmine nobilem’. In this poem, Horace explained how those favoured by Melpomene do not achieve renown through heroic or athletic feats but, instead, achieve distinction by means of ‘Aeolian verse’. The Latin poet attributes his own reputation as ‘the stringer of the Roman lyre’ to the gift bestowed on him by the muse. The quotation from Horace is appropriate for Cowper, who lived in rural seclusion and whose fame resulted from his poetic abilities. The reference to Horace could hint obliquely at Cowper’s unstable mental health, as the Latin poet’s well-known Ars Poetica compared unregulated poetry to ‘a sick man’s dreams’.
Blake carried out this engraving work while living in a cottage at Felpham, near Bognor Regis on the South Coast, as Hayley’s guest and employee (from 1800 to 1803). He produced yet another portrait of Cowper in tempera on canvas (now in Manchester Art Gallery) for Hayley’s library in his nearby Marine Turret, which although based on Romney’s portrait reverses its orientation. This portrait was part of a pantheon of 18 heads of poets including the Italians Dante and Tasso, and from the English school: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Otway, Pope and Hayley’s own late-lamented son Thomas Alphonso Hayley. The latter boy had been depicted by Romney as the sprite Puck in a painting of c.1790 now in the collection of Brighton & Hove Museums. Blake wrote to Hayley on 26 November 1800 about how he was ‘absorbed by the poets Milton, Homer, Camoens, Ercilla, Ariosto, and Spenser, whose physiognomies have been my delightful study’.[1] Blake had at times reason to complain of Hayley’s patronage, writing to his brother James Blake in 1803: ‘The truth is As a Poet he is frightend at me & as a Painter his views & mine are opposite he thinks to turn me into a Portrait Painter as he did Poor Romney, but this he nor all the devils in hell will never do’.[2]
Romney’s portrait was esteemed by the sitter and his friends as ‘extremely like’ and the artist himself considered it the nearest he had ever achieved to a ‘perfect representation of life and character’.[3] A more conventional portrait of the poet by Lemuel Francis Abbott was made in the same year and was used as a point of comparison to demonstrate the superior likeness of Romney’s portrait. Cowper wrote a sonnet addressed to Romney praising his ability to capture ‘the mind’s impression’ in his portraiture. However, a decade later, Harriet Lady Hesketh reacted with alarm at the idea of circulating an engraving of Romney’s portrait of Cowper – ‘I think it dreadful! Shocking!’ – because she believed that it represented her dear friend in the grip of madness.[4] ‘When he was labouring under his cruel Malady’, Lady Hesketh recalled, ‘he could not to bear to look in a Glass because he said he had the Countenance of a black Guard & a Villain’.[5] Hayley did not exactly allay her fears by arguing that Blake was the perfect artist to engrave Cowper’s portrait as he shared a similarly sensitive temperament: ‘He resembles our beloved Bard in the Tenderness of his Heart, & in the perilous powers of an Imagination utterly unfit to take due Care of Himself’, also displaying ‘little Touches of nervous Infirmity, when his mind is darkened with any unpleasant apprehension’.[6] In his biography, Hayley decorously avoided dwelling on Cowper’s recurrent mental illness and attempts at suicide, instead viewing his bouts of insanity as related to his poetic gifts:
The misfortune of mental derangement is a topic of such awful delicacy, that I consider it as the duty of a Biographer, rather to sink in tender silence than to proclaim, with circumstantial, and offensive temerity, the minute particulars of a calamity, to which all human beings are exposed, and perhaps in proportion as they have received from nature those delightful, but dangerous gifts, a heart of exquisite tenderness and a mind of creative energy.[7]
When she finally saw the engraving Lady Hesketh wrote to Hayley that ‘I must tell you that I admire Romneys head of all things! now it is Softened; of the engraving I pretend not to Judge, but I like it’.[8] She later added that ‘the print softens it extremely & it has not that distracted and distracting look which prevails in the miniature’.[9] A relieved Blake was able to report to his brother James that:
My Heads of Cowper for Mr H’s life of Cowper have pleasd his Relations exceedingly & in particular Lady Hesketh & Lord Cowper; to please Lady H was a doubtful change who almost adord her Cousin the poet & thought him all perfection & she writes that she is quite satisfied with the portraits & charmed by the great Head in particular tho she never could bear the original Picture.[10]
Cowper’s principal poetic work, The Task, began as a jokey challenge from a certain Lady Austen to write an epic about a sofa in Miltonic blank verse (non-rhyming iambic pentameter). Cowper began his poem in a light-hearted way but, as he explained in the prefatory ‘advertisement’, his train of thought led him to more serious topics, like political liberty (‘Tis Liberty alone that gives the flower / Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume’), and sensitive descriptions of natural beauty: ‘ADVERTISEMENT. The history of the following production is briefly this. A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the author, and gave him the SOFA for a subject. He obeyed; and having much leisure, connected another subject with it; and pursuing the train of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair – a Volume’.[11] Cowper’s didactic verse is no longer as popular as it was in the Eighteenth Century, although his hymns are still sung in church services, and his talent for a felicitous phrase means that his verse still has currency (‘God moves in a mysterious way / His wonders to perform’ or ‘Variety’s the very spice of life’). He also produced some revealing reflections on the creative process and how it relates to psychological distress:
‘There is a pleasure in poetic pains
Which only poets know. The shifts and turns,
Th’expedients and inventions multiform
To which the mind resorts, in chace of terms
Thought apt, yet coy, and difficult to win –
T’arrest the fleeting images that fill
The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast,
And force them sit, ‘till he has pencil’d off
A faithful likeness of the forms he views;
Then to dispose his copies with such art
That each may find its most propitious light,
And shine by situation, hardly less,
Than by the labor and the skill it cost,
Are occupations of the poet’s mind
So pleasing, and that steal away the thought
With such address, from themes of sad import,
That lost in his own musings, happy man!
He feels th’anxieites of life, denied
Their wonted entertainment, all retire.
Such joys has he that sings. But ah! not such,
Or seldom such, the hearers of his song.[12]
Seppilli saw myths and rituals as a magical response to existential angst on the part of pre-modern societies: ‘Anxiety concerning death, the human aspiration for the continuation of life after death, for oneself, for one’s own group and for all that sustains life, these things provide the initial impulse for the creation of myths like these’ [l’angoscia di fronte alla morte, l’aspirazione umana ad una continuità della vita oltre la morte, per sé, per il proprio gruppo e per tutto ciò che serve al proprio sostentamento, rappresentano la spinta iniziale al formarsi di tali miti].[13] An inability to comprehend non-existence created a psychological need for a mythopoetic response that through the power of words, of metaphors, stories and ritual actions made sense of the universe and provided reassurance in the face of death. What concerned and united whole communities in ancient times, or so-called ‘primitive’ societies, was experienced by Cowper as a solitary form of anguish from which he sought refuge in religion and poetry.
ADDENDUM: My thanks to the Cowper & Newton Museum in Olney for getting in touch to let me know that they have the second version of Blake’s miniature of Cowper in their collection, and also one of Cowper’s cousin, the Reverend John Johnson.
[1] William Blake to William Hayley, 26 November 1800, David V. Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, New York: Anchor Books, 1988, p. 714.
[2] William Blake to James Blake, 30 January 1803, The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, p. 725.
[3] William Hayley, A Life of George Romney, 1809, p. 177.
[4] Lady Hesketh to William Hayley, 19 March 1801, Blake Records, p. 105.
[5] Lady Hesketh to Johnny Johnson, 24 March 1801, Blake Records, p. 106.
[6] William Hayley to Lady Hesketh, 15 July 1802, Blake Records, p. 140.
[7] William Hayley, The Life and Posthumous Writings of William Cowper, Chichester: Printed by J. Seagrave for J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church-Yard, London, 1803, vol. 1, p. 26.
[8] Lady Hesketh to William Hayley, 29 December 1802, Blake Records, p. 147.
[9] Lady Hesketh to William Hayley, 15 January 1803, Blake Records, p. 148.
[10] William Blake to James Blake, 30 January 1803, Blake Records, p. 148.
[11] William Cowper, The Task, A Poem in Six Books, London: J. Johnson, 72 St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1785.
[12] Ibid, p. 60.
[13] Anita Seppilli, Poesia e magia, Torino: Einaudi, 1971, p. 237.