1821
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
The Pastorals of Virgil, Eclogue I: The Blasted Tree is a 1821 by William Blake, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a gnarled tree split by lightning, two shepherds talking beneath it, and a few sheep grazing in the distance. Blake made these as wood engravings—his only ones—for a schoolbook of Latin poems. The rough, scratchy lines give the scene a raw, almost hand-drawn feel, like he carved the image straight from his imagination. To see how other artists pictured nature in books, look up *William Blake*.
William Blake conceived and engraved 17 designs for Dr. Robert John Thornton’s The Pastorals of Virgil , a popular schoolbook used in teaching Latin. The publication included translations of poems by ancient Roman author Virgil that focus on a rural setting as both a subject matter and as the background for discussions of various issues, from love to politics. Blake’s illustrations reveal his emphasis on the natural world. As his only wood engravings, they also show how the process entails cutting away from the woodblock to create lighter sections, in essence working in white over a black…
Read the full account in the museum source.
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker.
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