Confident that the full significance of his work would one day be appreciated by posterity, Blake consoled himself that, rather than appealing to the blunt sensibilities of his day, he was ahead of his time and “laboured upwards to futurity”. He was right. In the two centuries since he passed away, singing sweetly on his deathbed of what he saw in Heaven, Blake has overcome every limitation of circumscribed skill and contemporary disfavour that hindered him. He has become, according to Martin Myrone, the lead curator of a new exhibition of Blake’s work at Tate Britain, the very “model of the autonomous genius and isolated visionary”.

A singular vision

Tate’s comprehensive retrospective, its first in nearly a generation, features more than 300 drawings, paintings, watercolours, woodcuts, and illustrated books, and provides the perfect opportunity to explore the secrets behind Blake’s ever-evolving legacy and to contemplate the emergence in popular imagination of a London eccentric whose ambition was to help us “see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”, to “hold Infinity in the palm of [our] hand / And Eternity in an hour”.