he rest of the family. At the age of ten, he was sent to Pars' drawing school on the Strand. James, the elder son encouraged him by giving him casts of the Gladiator, the Hercules, and the Venus de Medici, and pocket money to spend on his studies. His imagination was inflamed by prints after Raphael, Michael Angelo, Albert Durer, and others. He sought originals, genuine or spurious, in the sale-rooms and in private collections. (Wilson 3)
             Blake's seven years of training as an etcher-engraver gave the young man more than a profession. His master's shop practiced an old-fashioned, linear graphic technique. This style must have suited Blake's lifelong interest in early printmaking and contributed to one of his central aesthetic concepts expressed in his later writings: the artistic, and even philosophical, the superiority of line to color. Basire was engraver to the Society of Antiquaries and executed many illustrations for publications by the Royal Society. These activities brought Blake into contact with antiquarian studies, classical and British, and the most recent advances in the sciences. The clash between the antique and the contemporary and attempts to reconcile the two lie behind much in Blake's later life in the arts. What we find "visionary" or even strikingly modern in Blake's pictures and poems is frequently a product of his attempt to recover what he believed to be ancient styles and images. Always stressing imagination over reason, Blake felt that ideal forms should be constructed not from observations of nature but from inner visions.
             After his release from apprenticeship in 1779, Blake began to establish himself as an engraver. Reproducing illustrations for booksellers, and occasionally separate prints sold individually, became Blake's occupation and remained so for many years. In the summer of 1782, he married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener. She was Blake's helpmate to the end of his days a...