The Complaint and the Consolation; or, Night Thoughts

William Blake

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

About 1795 the bookseller Richard Edwards commissioned Blake to illustrate Edward Young's "Night Thoughts," a poem with nine sections. This large commission impacted his art and poetry, shaping his own prophetic poem "Vala or The Four Zoas" and, when the project proved a commercial failure, encouraging him to leave London and move to the seaside village of Felpham. When he received the commission, Blake made five hundred and thirty-seven watercolor drawings around pages of the first edition of Young's poem, inlaid into album sheets. He then engraved forty-three which were published as first installment in 1797. The public did not respond to Blake's novel imagery, sales proved minimal and the remaining sections never appeared, making the pages of this volume a fascinating fragment of a much larger intended whole.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art