The Canterbury Pilgrims

1810·Line engraving on cream laid paper·Image: 29.5 × 92 cm (11 5/8 × 36 1/4 in.); Plate: 30 × 92.5 cm (11 13/16 × 36 7/16 in.); Sheet: 36.8 × 96.5 cm (14 1/2 × 38 in.)

Those with devout hearts set out on medieval pilgrimages, but these journeys could also be experienced in social fellowship. The visionary English artist William Blake’s enormous frieze contains all 29 of Geoffrey Chaucer’s boisterous Canterbury Tales pilgrims, as well as a portrait of the author himself. In Chaucer’s book, each character tells stories while passing time along the way from London to Canterbury Cathedral, a pilgrimage route that rivaled the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Blake devoted reams of paper to advertise this print, describing Chaucer’s Tales as “the physiognomy or elements of universal human life.”

Catalogue

Year: 1810
Medium: Line engraving on cream laid paper
Dimensions: Image: 29.5 × 92 cm (11 5/8 × 36 1/4 in.); Plate: 30 × 92.5 cm (11 13/16 × 36 7/16 in.); Sheet: 36.8 × 96.5 cm (14 1/2 × 38 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: William Blake

Artist

William Blake

Painting

William Blake was an English poet, painter and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake has become a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his "prophetic works" were said by the 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "human existence itself".

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