Christ Blessing

William Blake painted Christ Blessing around 1810, during his later years when he was producing an intensely personal body of religious imagery that stood entirely outside the art establishment's conventions. Living in near-poverty in South Molton Street, London, Blake created visionary works that synthesized his own theological system with techniques drawn from medieval illumination and Michelangelo. Blake worked outside all institutional frameworks—never exhibiting at the Royal Academy, printing his books himself in tiny editions—yet his influence on subsequent British art and literature proved vast, from the Pre-Raphaelites to the 20th-century counterculture.

Blake's tempera technique on canvas produces the matte, fresco-like surface he preferred, deliberately rejecting the oil painting tradition he associated with Venetian sensuality. The linear emphasis and flattened space reflect his belief that firm outline was the foundation of all great art.