Young British Artists a Marketing Tool to Promote UK Contemporary Art During 1990s

William Blake was born on November 28, 1757, in the Soho district of London, England. He only briefly attended school, being chiefly educated at home by his mother. The Bible had an early, profound influence on Blake, and it would remain a lifetime source of inspiration, coloring his life and works with intense spirituality.

At an early age, Blake began experiencing visions, and his friend and journalist Henry Crabb Robinson wrote that Blake saw God's head appear in a window when Blake was 4 years old. He also allegedly saw the prophet Ezekiel under a tree and had a vision of "a tree filled with angels." Blake's visions would have a lasting effect on the art and writings that he produced.
At twenty, Blake’s apprenticeship to Basire being ended, he attended the Academy schools and drew from the antique under Keeper Moser, picking out for his chief delight and most ardent study the drawings of Michael Angelo and Raphael—a very barbaric choice it was considered, according to the decadent taste of the period.

Blake's artistic ability became evident in his youth, and by age 10, he was enrolled at Henry Pars's drawing school, where he sketched the human figure by copying from plaster casts of ancient statues. At age 14, he apprenticed with an engraver. Blake's master was the engraver to the London Society of Antiquaries, and Blake was sent to Westminster Abbey to make drawings of tombs and monuments, where his lifelong love of gothic art was seeded.
While Blake was educating  himself in art, he had to earn his livelihood by engraver’s work, and between 1779 and 1782 one or two booksellers employed him to engrave designs after various artists. In 1780 Blake exhibited his first picture in the Academy, “The Death of Earl Godwin.” It was only the twelfth exhibition of the institution, and the first to be held at Somerset House.

Among these artists was Stothard, to whom, in 1782, Blake was introduced. Stothard brought Flaxman and Blake together, and the three became warm friends. It was only after many years, and then through the machinations of an evil man (the publisher Cromek), that Blake became estranged from Stothard, and partially also from Flaxman.

In 1792 died the great leader of English art, Sir Joshua Reynolds. His work, concerned as it was with the exquisite graces of this passing world, had nothing to say to Blake, who regarded it in the light of his own artistic standpoint, with positive aversion. It often happens that a man who feels it his burning mission to work out and reveal some hitherto neglected or unseen aspect of truth, does so at the cost of a one-sidednesswhich is a necessary defect of his quality. Blake could no more appreciate Sir Joshua—at least at this stage of his being—than Sir Joshua could appreciate Blake. The characteristic notes which Blake appended to Reynolds’ “Discourses” many years later, express much of his dislike. Truly, it is easy to conceive of a mind offering nothing but delight and admiration to Reynolds’ practice, yet excited to a grave disapproval by much of his theory, or what he states as his theory.