These tiny scribbles may be William Blake’s earliest engravings, overlooked for nearly 250 years

Experts have discovered that scribbles engraved on the backs of 18th-century printing plates may be the work of a young William Blake.

The British writer and artist is best known for Songs about innocence and experiencea collection of poems full of lively illustrations. But long before that, he worked as a teenage apprentice in the studio of master engraver James Basire. Now, research from the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries suggests that the newly discovered scribbles may be the earliest engravings made by Blake as he began to master the craft.

The markings have been overlooked until now because they are difficult to see; some are even invisible to the naked eye. Mark Crosby, a literary scholar at Kansas State University discovered them with the help of RCHiOx technologythat scans the surfaces of objects at more than a million pixels per square inch.

“These doodles reveal personal, intimate moments that were not intended to be seen by anyone other than the artist,” said Crosby, whose research will be published in the journals. Print quarterly And Blake illustrated quarterlyin one statement. “For the first time since they were made, we can now see the young student’s practice work and scribbling.”

The copper plates were originally made to illustrate the book Grave monuments in Great Britain by antique dealer Richard Goeg. After Gough’s death in 1809 they were donated to the Bodleian Libraries.

Blake began working as an apprentice in 1772, when he was 15. He used the newly discovered plates as a sketchpad and filled them with “hatching, crosshatching, semicircles and motifs” – building blocks for a young artist learning how to engrave, according to the statement.

“Later in his life, in 1801, Blake called engraving ‘drawing on copper,’” Crosby told the London newspaper Times‘Jack Blackburn. “We get the feeling that he is drawing on copper with these scribbles.”

Some etchings are more detailed, others still look like the wandering scribbles of a teenager. In one, the student wrote the word ‘LONDON’ with the ‘O’ fully shaded. Another shows a small face consisting of two eyes, a partial nose and lips.

“When I first saw the face it was a stunning moment. I almost fell off my chair,” says Crosby ReutersSachin Ravikumar and Marissa Davison. “I was looking back at something that had been created about 250 years ago and hadn’t been seen before.”

After examining the plates together with other material in the Bodleian Libraries, Crosby concluded that the etchings were probably made by Blake. One plate contains an etching with a short shaft, a motif often found in Blake’s work. Similar arrows appear in Blake’s watercolor paintings of John Milton Paradise lost.

“I think he’s just like any teenager who might get bored easily doing this kind of very repetitive work, so he just kind of potters around,” Crosby told Reuters.

The new research helps experts understand more about Basire’s studio and the young apprentice who worked there.

As the Bodleian Libraries wrote in the statement: “If they are indeed the work of William Blake, these engravings reveal previously unknown insights into the artist’s artistic and technical development early in his career.”