William Blake - Head of Spalding
William Blake’s 1789 engraving of German rationalist Lutheran theologian, Johann Joachim Spalding (1714-1804), entitled Head of Spalding, perhaps at first observation diverges from the work Blake is best known, his illuminated poetry such as Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, printed and published the same year as this particular portrait. However, just as Blake saw his writing and art as completely inseparable, calling himself a painter-poet, Head of Spalding also represents a collapse of showing and telling in its physiognomic style. This portrait belongs to the fascination, popularized first in the late Renaissance or Early Modern Period, with the belief that the features of the face and outward appearance reveal the inner self and identity. Blake represents Spalding in profile, a pose which epitomized the physiognomic portrait as it allows the viewer to survey the individual’s facial features without fear that the surveyed figure may look back. Blake’s engraving is entirely devoid of background or even body, insisting that we only need observe the man’s face as only it can reveal this so called “inner self.” In this way, Head of Spalding demonstrates Blake’s interest and insistence on showing and telling through collapsing the external and internal selves and creating a figure who can, and in fact must, be read and perceived as a self beyond mere likeness.
Head of Spalding is not always known by this title in other museum and university collections and most commonly is referred to as “portrait of a man facing left” or “physiognomic portrait of a man” or even most vaguely, “head of a man.” As this work was initially created for Blake’s contemporary, friend, and colleague, Johann Kaspar Lavater’s monumental text, Essays on Physiognomy, it was printed as an untitled plate with the book accompanied only by Lavater’s description and analysis of the physiognomic attributes of the figure’s countenance. He states that, “a luminous mind is here distinguished at the first glance. That forehead contains solid and accurate ideas; that eye penetrates through the surface of objects… The forehead is that of a thinker who embraces a vast field; a sweet sensibility is painted in the eye, and the man of taste is discernible in the nose and the mouth.”1 Curiously, Lavater neglects to identify the man as Spalding. So is this engraving actually a portrait? In short, yes; however, perhaps not of the supposed sitter.
Mei-Ying Sung in William Blake and the Art of Engraving explains that examination of Blake’s copper plate engravings has been almost entirely neglected and estranged from his oeuvre in spite of, and likely due to, the intensive literary interest in Blake.2 Thus, scholars largely gravitate toward Blake’s paintings and woodblock prints, that are typically accompanied by text unlike his engravings, which are largely free of text, or at least text by the artist’s own hand. Herein lies the paradox of this sect Blake’s work— despite copper engravings being one of the most stable mediums Blake used and the best preserved, they are the least discussed. Like the prints themselves, their histories have been, until recently, shrouded in silence. However, if we were to “read” these silences and question what would cause a man who saw his literary and artistic practices as inseparable to leave out his signature verbiage, works such as Head of Spalding can be reinterpreted as performing and conveying the same philosophy that Blake pours into his other, more commonly examined works.
Part of the criticism and subsequent dismissal of Blake’s “commercial” works has been the supposed dissonance in their execution. Sung comments that pervious scholars have seen these meticulously executed engravings as lacking the “spontaneous” and “immediate” process that characterized Blake’s, and other Romantic artists’, art.3 For scholars that have addressed Blake’s engraving in length, notably Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi, engraving does fit their theories and Romantic notions of how Blake created this “spontaneous” and “immediate” process. This contradiction assumes that Blake was traditionally using engraving as it had been for centuries— with the transfer of model to sketch, sketch to finished drawing, drawing to engraving— steps disjointed by time and even changing artists’ hands. However, Blake streamlined this process himself and as Sung suggests— the fluidity of the single line carved by the engraving needle is even more “spontaneous” and “immediate” than the “push” and “pull” of woodblock carving and the continual re-dipping of the brush into ink, paint or acid wash that characterize Blake’s other works.4 Therefore, Blake’s engravings equally convey and are inseparable from his philosophy as they too are products of the unity of invention and execution, mind and hand working as one.
Blake’s use of single point lighting, from the upper left side of the space, into which the figure looks, makes Spalding’s features easily visible for our inspection and highlights their visibility without exaggerating or concealing. As the portrait is an engraving, characterized by fine, precise cross hatching, line is almost inseparable from light. Their conjunction creates a legibility which is insisted upon in physiognomic portraiture: for every feature we see, we are able to read and derive meaning. For Blake vision was a psychological, philosophical, ethical and religious tool and central to his art and mission was this “psychological attack on empirical rationalism.”5 Spalding, like Blake, opposed enlightenment era rationalism. By his positioning toward the light, Blake suggests that Spalding has, so to speak, “seen the light,” which illuminates both his eyes and forehand. From the top, his rounded large forehead, not disguised by pastor’s cap or powdered wig, his fine, short hair retreats, indicating a highly developed frontal lobe, the space of rationality and conscious thought, and shows that this man spends a great deal of time deep in thought, thoughts perhaps much greater than the average individual. This quality is again emphasized by the shading around his temple and cheekbone as the upper, bulbous portion of his face protrudes considerably.
Blake describes that “man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover.”6 For Blake philosophy had always been a “demonstration by the senses” as “worldy wisdom” and had profound artistic connections.7 Therefore, seeing (or otherwise perceiving), art and philosophy are inherently intertwined in Blake’s mind and he rejected the enlightenment era individualistic thinking as it directly conflicted with his philosophy on art and all other aspects, to him all things were inseparable and not singularly perceptible.8
So how then does physiognomy, fit into Blake’s mission as it insists on visual perception?
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, physiognomy was characterized as a sort of speechless language or “wordless speech” which some contemporaries, such as Lavater, suggested was even more honest and powerful that written or spoken language which could be used deceptively or misconstrued.9 Thus physiognomy as an artist and interpretive practice was a literal collapse of visual and linguistic— Blake could retain his “painter-poet” status whilst omitting text entirely.
Head of Spalding is exceptional even within this body of work, although it is but one of the three-hundred engravings for Lavater’s book, which was translated to English and supervised by, and in some part influenced by Blake’s fellow Romanticist artist, Henry Fuesli.10 Essick asserts that few of Blake’s illustrations for Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy are worth or have been given much attention, the exceptions being Blake’s portrait of the book’s author and that of Spalding.11 This comment is also confirmed by Lavater’s own reverence for that particular portrait perhaps owing to the resemblance both Lavater and numerous scholars have found between the portrait and Blake’s own profile.12 As I discussed earlier, Spalding and Blake shared philosophical ideologies making him a logical object of Blake’s admiration. Neither Blake nor Spalding’s name appear on the engraving, adding to the confusion of precisely with whom the figure shares a likeness. Essick argues though at the time of its creation Blake was thirty-two, much too young for the sagging jowls of Spalding’s profile, Blake seems to have altered his own features to resemble Spalding’s, or visa-versa, creating a sort of prophecy that Blake hoped would be self-fulfilling.13 This interpretation on the part of Blake is likely precisely because of his belief in physiognomy— if he resembled Spalding in features and literally saw himself in the object of his admiration, he possessed those same qualities which the features indicated. As a man who desired to look through the eye, not with it, and as a writer who was beginning to set forth “solid and accurate ideas” on many subjects, Blake may have taken a special interest in this portrait, more so than any other in the collection.14 In this way, Head of Spalding acts as a sort of double portrait of both the artist and the sitter.
Although Blake admired Spalding, it is almost certain that the two never met, a fact which complicates our reading this engraving as a portrait. Lavater’s description of Spalding’s character and physiognomy is approving yet he never mentions the sitter’s identity nor whether the print bears veracious resemblance to the theologian, with whom Lavater was well acquainted. Scholars have searched for what reference Blake, who already was habitually working without a model, used to create this print, some such as Mary Lynn John concluding that he likely examined other physiognomic prints by the German print maker, Daniel Niklaus Chodowiecki, to create Head of Spalding.15 I would argue that this distinction of having known Spalding only through his writing and portraits by other artists allowed Blake to idealize and idolize Spalding even more, transforming a corporal man into an object or idea that embodied all that Blake desired to become and thus providing the perfect canvas onto which he could project himself and map his own features.
Blake’s Head of Spalding represents a portraiture beyond likeness, one whose form is its function and performs the philosophy for which it strands. In his representation of himself as other, Blake crafts a mask of his own features which, rather than conceal the identity of the sitter, reveals both his own and his philosophy; in the process, he renders Spalding in his own image. Ultimately, this work represents the type of unifying collapse that characterizes all of Blake’s work, a collapse of writing into printing/painting, of form and function, and self and other.
Lauren Miller
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1John Caspar Lavater, Essays on Phisognomy, trans. Henry Hunter (London, 1789), I, 224-5.
2Mei-Ying Sung, William Blake and the Art of Engraving, (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009) 11.
3Sung, William Blake, 11.
4Ibid., 12.
5See Jean H. Hagstrum, “William Blake Rejects the Enlightenment,” in Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1966) 144.
6Hagstrum, “William Blake,” 145.
7Ibid., 146.
8Ibid., 153.
9Joan K. Stemmler, “The Physiognomical Portraits of Johann Caspar Lavater,” Art Bulletin 75 No. 1 (March 1993): 153.
10For more on Fuseli’s involvement and connection with Lavater and Blake see Michael Davis, William Blake: A New Kind of Man, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) 46.
11Robert N. Essick, William Blake Print Maker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 60.
12Ibid., 60.
13Ibid., 61.
14Ibid., 60-61.
15Mary Lynn Johnson, “Blake’s Engravings for Lavater’s Physiognomy: Overdue Credit to Chodowiecki, Schellenberg and Lips,” Blake and Illustrated Quarterly 38 No. 2 (Fall 2004): 52-87.