ver the last thirty years, William Blake’s methods of etching the
copperplates of his illuminated books have received more scrutiny
than the ways he printed those plates. In 2000, however, printing
techniques rose to the forefront of attention among the small band
of scholars interested in how Blake made his books as the material
foundation for interpretations of what they mean. Credit is due
to Michael Phillips, for many years a well regarded bibliographic
and historical scholar of Blake’s life and works, for raising the
issue of Blake’s color printing methods and thereby stimulating
the debate we wish to initiate in this essay. Phillips proposes
that Blake created color-printed impressions of his relief etchings
by passing them through his rolling press twice, once to print the
text in ink and a second time to color print the design on the same
sheet of paper. This “two-pull” procedure (as we will call it throughout
this essay) differs fundamentally from a “one-pull” procedure, in
which the inked text and the colored image are printed simultaneously
in one pass through the rolling press. [2]
The first, prominent appearance of his theory, one that attracted
wide attention, was in the catalogue (Hamlyn and Phillips 106-07,
118) and wall labels for the great Tate Britain Blake exhibition,
London, fall and winter 2000-01. [3]
A few of the labels in the smaller version of the exhibition at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, spring 2001, also at least
hinted at the two-pull theory. In the exhibition catalogue sold
at both venues, the two-pull theory is described in a straightforward
manner that implies it is a generally accepted fact. By far the
fullest explanation for the two pull procedure is presented in chapter
5 of Phillips' book, William Blake: The Creation of the Songs
of Innocence and of Experience from Manuscript to Illuminated
Printing (95-108).
The museums and publishers presenting the two-pull theory cannot
fail to attract considerable respect. It is difficult to imagine
more prestigious art-historical institutions than the Tate and the
Met. The British Library and Princeton University Press lend similar
authority to Phillips’ book. We assume that both publishers solicited
the advice, and received the approval, of leading authorities in
Blake and the graphic arts. The positive reception of Phillips
book is indicated by Vincent Carrettas and K. E. Smith's glowing
reviews in Eighteenth-Century Studies and The Blake Journal
respectively. But before the two-pull theory achieves complete acceptance
within the community of Blake scholars, we wish to raise some serious
reservations concerning its accuracy. We do so within the context
of a thorough examination of Blake’s color prints, their minute
visual features and the processes that created them, as well as
their relationship to the color-printing technologies of the eighteenth
century. We will also explain (and question) how the two-pull hypothesis
implies a “Blake” very different from the artist, poet, and aesthetic
theorist Blake himself portrays explicitly in his writings on the
arts and implicitly throughout his graphic productions. Although
we disagree strongly with Phillips’ theory, we are grateful to him
for bringing to our attention the technical issues and their larger
conceptual implications we consider in what follows. As Blake wrote
in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Opposition is true Friendship”
(E 42).
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