Seamus Perry at Literary Review:
A lot of what comes in William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is about fellow enthusiasts rather than about Blake himself. It opens with Derek Jarman at the Avebury stone circle, treading in the footsteps of Paul Nash; then, by what Coleridge called the ‘streamy nature of association’, we follow Nash on his first trip to London in 1906, where, at the Carfax gallery, he saw an exhibition of Blake’s pictures. These moved him greatly – or, as Hoare puts it, ‘A crack in the sky opened up and a hand reached down.’ Another cut then takes us to John Singer Sargent in 1894 painting his memorable portrait of W Graham Robertson, who later illustrated a book called Pan’s Garden by his friend Algernon Blackwood, who purchased a great collection of Blake’s pictures from the family of his devoted patron Thomas Butts. Those were the paintings displayed in the Carfax gallery. As Nash looked at them, says Hoare, he saw ‘the god behind the machine’ – the machine in question being the modern industrial world of ‘science and rationalism’, that familiar bogey whom we can all deplore while enjoying its many benefits.
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