Alan Moore on William Blake's apparitions

Courtesy of the Daily Grail - here's an article in the Guardian by the graphic novelist Alan Moore about two apparitions seen by William Blake at his house in Lambeth. One of them was later turned into a painting entitled "The Ghost of a Flea," commissioned by Blake's spiritualistically inclined friend and patron, John Varley:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/a...liam-blake

Courtesy of the Daily Grail - not about apparitions, but I thought I'd post it here - Brain Pickings has an article showing Blake's illustrations for a book for children by Mary Wollstonecraft, entitled "Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness." There are ten preliminary drawings and six finished etchings. Some of the original drawings are quite striking:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/07/23...tonecraft/

Courtesy of the Daily Grail - not about apparitions, but I thought I'd post it here - Brain Pickings has an article showing Blake's illustrations for a book for children by Mary Wollstonecraft, entitled "Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness." There are ten preliminary drawings and six finished etchings. Some of the original drawings are quite striking:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/07/23...tonecraft/

Thanks for the link, Chris.  Blake has special meaning for me.  The etchings were of a group I don't remember seeing before.  They seemed to carry deep emotions linked to their text.  As craft, I also noticed the skill of Blake to create "cells" that would carry ink precisely.  His skills using gravure as fine art - are really on display in the baby Mary Shelly print.

  Rather the poems and the pictures are each counterparts in their proper medium of the image in his mind. These mental images had for Blake an almost objective reality, and he did not regard them as poetic fancies but as actual visions of a reality veiled from the sensual eye. In his own belief he lived in a world peopled with spirits visible to the eye of the imagination, which had a reality at least as great as that of the material world around him. In fact it may be said that for him the ordinary positions of reality and imagination were reversed, and that the world of the imagination was to him more vivid and actual than the world of the senses. How far his visions were hallucinatory is unimportant in considering his art, and each one will come to a different conclusion on this point according to his own attitude to the unseen world. What is important is Blake's own implicit belief in the reality of his visions, and it is this which gives the peculiar force and intensity to his work.

 http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/old-mast...-blake.htm