Evening

Blake's Evening from around 1820-25 is a late watercolor that shows his mature synthesis of his personal visionary mythology with the natural world's daily cycle. Evening's transition from day to night was one of Blake's primary symbolic moments — the failing of material light as the beginning of spiritual illumination, the threshold between the visible world and the eternal realm that he believed underlay it. His late watercolors and temperas achieved a luminous color quality through his idiosyncratic technique that gave even natural subjects — time of day, seasonal change, weather — a quality of supernatural presence. This late work shows him working in a more intimate, lyrical register than his major prophetic books.

Blake's mixed technique of watercolor and chalk on wood creates a luminous, dreamlike effect, with soft atmospheric washes contrasting with his characteristically precise linear drawing.