Pity

William Blake's Pity from 1795, in the Tate, is one of his large color prints illustrating a passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth: "And pity, like a naked new-born babe, striding the blast." The image of a supernatural figure on horseback reaching for an infant embodies Blake's vision of spiritual forces operating beyond the material world. These large color prints, of which Blake created only a small number of impressions, represent his most sustained effort to create a new visual vocabulary for his mythological and philosophical ideas.

Blake's unique color-printing technique combines planographic printing with hand-applied color and overpainting. The spectral blue and green palette and the dynamic, wind-blown composition create a visionary image that exists between printmaking and painting, embodying Blake's rejection of conventional artistic categories.