Blake's Illustrations to the Poems of Gray
by: Tayler, Irene

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. Color frontispiece, black and white reduced facsimile after the text. 169 pages. This work was commissioned by Blake's friend John Flaxman for his wife Ann, adapted from the 1790 edition of "Gray's Poems", and was likely completed around 1800. These illustrations were not available to the public during Blake's lifetime, likely due to a combination of the owner Ann Flaxman's desire to keep them exclusive, and the politically subversive nature of the contents which would have been dangerous for Blake. Clean copy.