“minutely Appropriate Execution”: Variation and Pentimento in Blake’s Title Pages

In the Descriptive Catalogue, Blake draws on and develops some of his manuscript responses to Reynolds to set out a theory of art that emphasizes an aesthetic predicated on inspiration over an aesthetic reliant from memory. Blake also advocates an immediacy of artistic practice, where pensieri, or first thoughts, are rendered “with a bounding line” seemingly without revision. In the title pages of Illuminated Books and two manuscript works, evidence of variation and pentimento, or second thoughts, offers an insight into Blake’s creative practice. This chapter argues that despite Blake’s strictures on the significant differences in theory and practice between what he considered true “inspiration and imagination” pictorially rendered via the “bounding outline” and an inferior aesthetic predicated on memory executed via ‘blotting and blurring’, there was some leeway in his creative process for variation and artistic second thoughts.