Pity (William Blake)

• 1. Introduction

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  Pity, a colour print made by William Blake around 1795, begins with a scene borrowed from a murderer's imagination. In the third act of Macbeth, the king steels himself before killing Duncan by conjuring a vision: pity, like a naked newborn babe, striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed upon the sightless couriers of the air. Blake took those three lines and made them visible. The result is one of the strangest images in British art. A female cherub swoops from above, leaning down to snatch a baby from a woman who lies motionless below. What does it mean for a print to illustrate a simile? And why would Blake, a poet himself, choose to picture an emotion that his own mythology treated with deep suspicion? Those are the questions this documentary will trace.

• 2. The Making of a Monotype

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  Blake produced Pity using a technique he developed for a set of works now called the Large Colour Prints. He began by painting onto gessoed millboard and then pressing paper against the surface to lift the image. From a single painted matrix he could pull up to three impressions, each one then finished by hand in ink and watercolour. Three impressions from the main matrix of Pity survive today. A fourth impression, held at the British Museum, is smaller than the others and comes from a different matrix. It is catalogued as a trial of the design rather than a finished work. The William Blake Archive has established the printing order of the larger-matrix impressions: the Yale Center for British Art holds the first pull, the Tate Gallery in London holds the second, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds the third.

• 3. Four Versions, Four Homes

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  The Tate Gallery in London holds the version most scholars consider the most elaborate and best-known of the set, catalogued as Butlin 310. W. Graham Robertson presented it to the gallery in 1939. The Metropolitan Museum of Art version, donated by Mrs. Robert W. Goelet in 1958, is described as less elaborately worked than the Tate impression. At the Yale Center for British Art, the print has yellowed somewhat from varnish, though its printing characteristics are what allowed scholars to identify it as the earliest pull from the larger matrix. The British Museum's trial impression, Butlin 313, is the most unusual of the four. It depicts the prone figure partially covered in sweeping fronds of long grass, a detail absent from the other versions. Blake's biographer Alexander Gilchrist described the subject as a woman bending down to succour a man stretched out as if given over to death, a reading that measures how far personal response can drift from the Shakespearean source.

• 4. Pity in Blake's Mythology

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  Martin Butlin wrote that this print stands among the most inspired literal illustrations of a text in the history of art, yet the word "literal" carries a particular weight here. Blake chose to visualise not a scene from Macbeth but a simile within a speech. Two words from Shakespeare's lines, pity and air, become the two governing motifs of the image. That precision matters because Blake was not a straightforward admirer of pity as a virtue. Critics have argued that for Blake, pity was associated with the failure of inspiration and a further dividing. Within his own mythology, the emotion is bound up with Tharmas, a figure whose sexual frustration transforms him into a terror to all living things. Pity also surfaces in the confrontation between a feminine Pity and a masculine fiery force, a dynamic replayed in the brutal suppression of desire within the figure of Urizen.

• 5. Macbeth's Revival and The Night of Enitharmon's Joy

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  Macbeth was not simply a dusty classic when Blake made this print. Nicholas Rawlinson has noted that the play was undergoing a major revival in popularity at the time, being performed nine times in 1795 alone. That context shapes how Blake's audience would have encountered the image. Pity is typically read alongside another print from the same period, The Night of Enitharmon's Joy, also dated to around 1795. Where that print shows a Hecate surrounded by fantastic creatures and macabre elements of a nightmare, Pity offers something the scholars describe as a possibility of salvation in the fallen world. Both prints draw on Macbeth, placing them in a kind of dialogue. Some critics have also found a connection between Pity and William Butler Yeats' The Wind Among the Reeds, published in 1899, noting a shared quality of hypnotic and helpless state between the two works.