The Canterbury Pilgrims

Blake's Canterbury Pilgrims composition — produced as a tempera painting in 1808 and as an engraving in 1810 — was one of his most ambitious attempts to enter the mainstream of British art on his own terms. The subject pitted him directly against Thomas Stothard, who was simultaneously producing his own Canterbury pilgrims composition, and the rivalry became bitter and public. Blake believed his design was original and that Stothard had stolen it, and he spent considerable energy promoting his version through a one-man exhibition in 1809 and his Descriptive Catalogue. The painting represents a confrontation between Blake's mythological vision of English literary history and the polite illustrative tradition Stothard represented.

Blake renders the Chaucerian procession as a frieze-like horizontal composition that recalls classical relief sculpture — the pilgrims arranged in a continuous lateral movement that Blake used to characterize each figure's moral and social type. His tempera technique, which he called 'fresco,' gives the surface a dry, granular quality distinct from the luminosity of his watercolors.