Enoch

William Blake

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Blake’s only lithograph celebrates artistic creativity as springing from closeness to the divine. The composition centers on Enoch, a mysterious Old Testament figure described in Genesis 5:22-29 as having "walked with God." Representing theological speculation that the patriarch invented writing, Blake places him a dais holding a book inscribed with Hebrew letters with hovering beings to either side representing prophesy and inspiration. Below, Enoch’s children practice painting, music and poetry to suggest that all the arts flow from writing. The technique demonstrates the artist’s experimental approach to print-making. Lithography was invented in Germany in the mid-1790s, reached London in 1800, and was patented as "polyautography." Attracted by the new process, Blake either rented or borrowed a printing stone from the patent holder, Georg Jacob Vollweiler, but devised his own unique mixture of lithographic and acid relief methods to produce Enoch. Only four copies of the print have survived and the first owner of this version transcribed Blake’s unique method on the verso, the text now visible over the prophet’s head.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art