Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Plate 42, "The Tyger" (Bentley 42, detail), 1794, William Blake. Color-printed relief etching with watercolor on moderately thick, slightly textured, cream wove paper. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
William Blake and India
GETTY CENTER
Harold M. Williams Auditorium
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From the late 18th to early 19th centuries, artist William Blake lived in a London that was both the center of a global empire and a hoard for art from around the world. Indian art was especially prevalent, featured at popular venues such as the East India Company Museum. In this talk, British art scholar Tara Contractor explores works from the exhibition William Blake: Visionary alongside some of the Indian artworks that Blake most likely viewed. Indian art emerges as an influence not only on Blake's idiosyncratic style and materials, but also on his understanding of himself as an artist working within a global sphere.
Speaker
Tara Contractor is assistant curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She previously held positions at the Bruce Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and Yale Center for British Art, where she was a guest curator of the exhibition Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin in 2019. She holds a PhD from Yale University and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her research has been recognized with support from the Delaware Art Museum, the Huntington Library and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.