Monument To William And Catherine Sophia Blake, Central Broadwalk

Monument to William and Catherine Sophia Blake, Central Broadwalk, Bunhill Fields Burial Ground

A simple upright sandstone slab with a shaped top, renewed in 1927 on the centenary of William Blake's death. The inscription reads: "Near by lie the remains of the poet-painter William Blake 1757-1827 and of his wife Catherine Sophia 1762-1831".

William Blake (1757-1827) is now recognised as one of the most revered artistic and literary figures of the Romantic era. Born into a tradesman's family in Soho, he showed from an early age both graphic ability and mystical tendencies, making sketches after the Renaissance masters and encountering visions of angels and prophets on the rural fringes of London. At 14 he was apprenticed to the master printmaker James Basire, and as a young man worked as a commercial engraver whilst training as a painter at the Royal Academy of Arts; his first original works comprised a series of watercolours on English historical themes. In 1782 Blake married Catherine Sophia Boucher, who became his muse and helpmate throughout his creative career, and in 1783 published his first book of verse, Poetical Sketches. He developed a new technique of relief etching, which he believed was guided from beyond the grave by his younger brother Robert (died 1787), and used it to produce a series of "illuminated books" combining freehand text and visionary painted images. These included Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794). With Catherine, Blake attended a Swedenborgian church, but his own anti-Christian mysticism found expression in works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790). He continued commercial work and carried out commissions for the writer William Hayley, at whose behest he moved to Felpham in Sussex in 1800. The friendship soured, and in 1803, having been indicted for sedition after an altercation with a soldier, Blake returned to London. He was later acquitted, but his commercial career declined and he immersed himself in private projects including the illustrated mythological epics Milton and Jerusalem (both published in 1804). Though his avant-garde style increasingly distanced him from the Royal Academy, in old age he was championed by younger artists and writers who revered him as a genius and sage, commissioning many of his last works including his unfinished cycle of illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy.

Blake's work exerted immense influence on later Romantic and Modernist writers and artists, particularly Samuel Palmer and W.B. Yeats. The original monument was replaced with the present headstone in 1927; this was subsequently moved during the re-landscaping of the 1960s. Blake's actual resting place is in the cleared northern section of the burial ground, east of the surviving tomb of Matthew Wilks.

Bunhill Fields was first enclosed as a burial ground in 1665. Thanks to its location just outside the City boundary and its independence from any Established place of worship, it became London's principal Nonconformist cemetery, the burial place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Blake and other leading religious and intellectual figures. It was closed for burials in 1853, laid out as a public park in 1867, and re-landscaped following war damage by Bridgewater and Shepheard in 1964-65. The monument is listed for commemorating one of the Romantic era's most celebrated and influential writers and artists, and for its location within the Grade I registered Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, where it has group value with other listed tombs in the central broadwalk and especially with the neighbouring monument to Daniel Defoe.