William Blake and His Contemporaries

This fascinating, well-documented exhibition of British eighteenth-century prints and drawings has been selected from the Permanent Collection of the National Gallery of Canada. The artists draw on such diverse sources as Homer, the Bible, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Shelley for their images and themes, which highlight the Romanticist-Classicist dichotomy of the period. On one hand, a neo-classic view of civilization is presented in works such as James Barry's series The Progress of Human Culture and Thomas Stothard's designs for the magnificent shield commemorating Wellington's defeat of Napoleon; on the other, a more imaginative, romantic approach is epitomized by William Blake's visionary and biblical scenes (of which 13 are included here), and John Hamilton Mortimer's etchings of monsters. Prints and drawings by John Flaxman, Henry Fuseli, George Romney and Theodor von Holst complete this collection, which was organized and circulated by the National Gallery of Canada.