William Blake

The Ghost Of A Flea - c.1819-1820       [Tate Britain, London]

William Blake (1757-1827) was born in London, the city in which he would live and work as an artist, engraver and poet for most of his life. From the Autumn of 1819 he embarked upon a series of works which became known as the 'Visionary Heads'. In the company of his friend John Varley, a watecolourist of the early nineteenth-century English school with an active interest in astrology and zodiacal physiognomy, he would undertake experimental seances during which he would sketch his visions of the long dead.

Whilst engaged in such sessions Blake conceived of a malign presence which he declared to be 'The Ghost Of A Flea', having a human-like form flecked in green and gold, flicking its tongue towards a bowl of drained blood.

Varley later recalled Blake as he waited for the creature's second visitation:
"Here he is - reach me my things - I shall keep my eye on him. There he comes! his ever eager tongue whisking out of his mouth, a cup in his hands to hold blood and covered with a scaly skin of gold and green."

In his 'Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy', Varley disclosed that Blake started to draw the image but 'left off, and began on another part of the paper, to make a separate drawing of the mouth of the Flea, which the spirit having opened, he was prevented from proceeding with the first sketch, till he had closed it. During the time occupied in completing the drawing, the Flea told him that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of such men, as were by nature blood-thirsty to excess, and were therefore providentially confined to the size and form of insects; otherwise, were he himself the size of a horse, he would depopulate a great portion of the country. He added, that if in attempting to leap from one island to another, he should fall into the sea, he could swim, and should not be lost.'

Blake made two sketches of the creature in his notebook, and then thought so well of the image that he painted it in tempera upon a panel when he returned to his home.