Pity (c. 1795) is a colour print on paper, finished inink andwatercolour, by theEnglish artist and poetWilliam Blake, one of the group known as the "Large Colour Prints". Along with his other works of this period, it was influenced by theBible,Milton, andShakespeare.[2] The work is unusual, as it is a literal illustration of a double simile fromMacbeth, found in the lines:
Like other members of the group, it is amonotype produced by printing from a matrix consisting of paint ongessoedmillboard, with each impression then finished by hand. Blake could obtain up to three impressions from a single painting by this unusual means. Three such impressions survive ofPity. A fourth, in theBritish Museum, was an early trial of the design from a different matrix, as it is smaller than the others.[4]
Martin Butlin wrote that this colour print is one of the most inspired of all 'literal' illustrations of a text in thehistory of art.[5] In fact, "pity and air", two words of Shakespeare's verses, are also twomotifs used by Blake in this picture: a female cherub leans down to snatch the baby from its mother. According to Blake's biographerAlexander Gilchrist, the print "is on a tolerably large scale, a woman bending down to succour a man stretched out at length as if given over to death."[6]
Pity is seen as in opposition to Blake's printThe Night of Enitharmon's Joy (c. 1795) — which shows aHecate surrounded byfantastic creatures and macabre elements of anightmare — because it provides a "possibility ofsalvation" in the fallen world through pity.[7] Both prints refer toMacbeth. As Nicholas Rawlinson has noted, the play was undergoing a major revival in popularity at the time, being performed nine times in 1795.[8]
It is apersonification[9] of aChristian element[10] that some critics argue was a negativevirtue for Blake, since pity is associated with "the failure of inspiration and a further dividing"[11] and also "linked by alliteration and capitalization".[12] It is also a part ofBlake's mythology, in which asexually frustratedTharmas becomes "a terror to all living things", although the emotion inherent in him is a pity.[13] Other Blake characters have this feeling, and his mythology is developed between the confrontation of afeminine "Pity" and amasculine fiery, as happens in the brutal suppression of desire inUrizen.[14]
The slightly retouched version at the Yale Center for British Art
The print exists in four versions from two different matrices. The most elaborate and best-known version of the print is in theTate Gallery,London, sometimes described as the only finished one. It was presented by W. Graham Robertson to the gallery in 1939 and is catalogued as "Butlin 310".[16]
A unique "proof print" is in theBritish Museum (Butlin 313). It is "significantly smaller than the final version of the design" and depicts the supine figure "partially covered in vegetation" in the form of sweeping fronds of long grass.[17]
Another version of the image is in the collection of theMetropolitan Museum of Art. This is not as elaborately worked as the Tate print. It was donated by Mrs. Robert W. Goelet in 1958.[18]
A lightly retouched version at theYale Center for British Art also exists, somewhat yellowed by varnish. According to The William Blake Archive, "The characteristics of the colour printing indicate that this impression is the first one printed from the larger matrix in 1795. The second impression in this printing isPity in the Tate Collection (Butlin 310); the third impression is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Butlin 311)."[19]
^Metropolitan Museum of Art (1980).The painterly print: Monotypes from the seventeenth to the twentieth century [exhibition], p. 84.
^Bindman, David (1977).Blake as an Artist. Phaidon. p. 106.
^Blake Archive.org, "The Large Color Printed Drawings of 1795 and c. 1805"
^Blutin, Martin.The Evolution of Blake's Large Color Prints of 1795, inWilliam Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin Rosenfeld (Providence: Brown University Press 1969), p. 109.
^Gilchrist wrote "a man" because he looked at a version of the print without colour.Gilchrist, Alexander (1863).Life of William Blake, "Pictor ignotus": With selections from his poems and other writings Macmillan and Co., p. 253.
^Butlin, Martin (1990).William Blake 1757-1827. Tate Gallery Collections, V, London
