Pity (William Blake)

Interpretations

Martin Butlin described this colour print as one of the most inspired literal illustrations of a text in art history. The picture uses two motifs from Shakespeare's verses: pity and air, showing a female cherub leaning down to snatch a baby from its mother. Alexander Gilchrist noted that the print depicts a woman bending to succour a man stretched out as if given over to death.

Pity is seen as opposing Blake's The Night of Enitharmon's Joy, which features Hecate with fantastic creatures and nightmare elements, because it offers a possibility of salvation in the fallen world. Both prints reference Macbeth, a play undergoing a major revival in 1795 with nine performances that year. The work personifies a Christian element that some critics argue was a negative virtue for Blake, associating pity with failure of inspiration and further dividing, linked by alliteration and capitalization.

In Blake's mythology, a sexually frustrated Tharmas becomes a terror to all living things, yet the emotion inherent in him is pity. Other Blake characters share this feeling, and his mythology develops between a feminine Pity and a masculine fiery force, as seen in the brutal suppression of desire in Urizen. Some critics connect Pity to the hypnotic and helpless state in William Butler Yeats' The Wind Among the Reeds.

Versions

Blake’s Pity exists in four impressions made from two separate plates. The most finished and famous version, catalogued as Butlin 310, hangs in the Tate Gallery in London; it was donated there by W. Graham Robertson in 1939. A unique proof print in the British Museum (Butlin 313) is noticeably smaller than the final design and shows the reclining figure partly hidden by sweeping grass. Another, less detailed version is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, given by Mrs. Robert W. Goelet in 1958.

A fourth impression, lightly retouched and yellowed by varnish, is held by the Yale Center for British Art. According to the William Blake Archive, that Yale print was the first pulled from the larger matrix in 1795. The Tate impression (Butlin 310) came second in that printing, and the Metropolitan Museum’s (Butlin 311) came third.