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This exhibition has been organised to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Blake’s birth as well as the 200th anniversary of the Parliamentary abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. The Whitworth is the final venue for the exhibition - it was previously at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull and Burrell Collection in Glasgow.
Slavery was a fundamental theme in William Blake’s art and writing. He was fervently opposed to it, and during his lifetime (1757-1827) saw successful campaigns against the slave trade in the British Empire, leading to its abolition in 1807. This new Hayward Touring exhibition features watercolours, prints and plates from Blake’s illuminated books alongside other prints of the period showing contemporary attitudes to slavery.
William Blake grew up in the period when public disquiet against the cruelty and injustice of the slave trade was gathering strength. The campaign led by the former slave Olaudah Equiano and concerned citizens such as Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, turned public opinion against this horrific trade. Blake was made aware of the horrors of slavery through his commissioned engravings illustrating the experiences of Captain Stedman, a mercenary soldier in Surinam. But for Blake slavery was also a mental state. To have limited perceptions, to pursue materialistic ends, to set oneself above others, to follow conventional religion or science was to be enslaved and to be held with ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ of one’s own making. In Blake’s art, many of his most dramatic and complex images show a confrontation between the forces of repression and those seeking freedom.