
William Blake
Tate Britain
OFTEN linked to Constable and Turner as one of the three great British 19th-century Romantic artists, William Blake was a genuinely unique poet, printmaker and painter.
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Despite a small middle-class following, he remained a social outsider due to his class, political radicalism and for being an artisan rather than a trained “fine artist” at a time when the art establishment, led by Joshua Reynolds, was redefining art as a liberal pursuit on a par with the gentlemanly intellectual pursuits of literature and philosophy.



