“O what a scene is here”: Visual References in Blake’s An Island in the Moon

Blake’s An Island in the Moon has become well known for the poet’s satirical portrayals of some of his friends and acquaintances—including himself, disguised as “Quid the Cynic”. This chapter explores the possibility that he may also have been making allusions to several works of art, mostly by using very short, at times almost epigrammatic, parodical ekphrases. Island is notorious for the amount of cryptic hints and inside jokes that Blake used, and so his references to the visual culture of his time, being as they are subtly ingrained in the text, are not easy to detect. This catalogue of abstruse allusions will perhaps contribute to our understanding of the visual archive that he was working with at the time.