A spiral of pale spirits descends on a sleeping queen

A great slow spiral of pale spirits — bodies weightless, arms linked and reaching, faces indistinct — wheels down through the upper half of the sheet toward a woman in white who rises to meet them with both hands open. Beneath, in the shadowed foreground, an old man in blue-green sits hunched at the left and a woman in ochre robes leans on her hand at the right, both asleep, framed by the arches of a chamber. Blake returned to this scene from Shakespeare's Henry VIII repeatedly across thirty years; this late watercolour is the most crowded and the most tender of them.

William Blake (1757–1827) was a London engraver, poet and visionary who claimed to have seen angels in a tree at Peckham Rye as a boy and never stopped drawing what he saw. Ignored in his lifetime and buried in an unmarked grave, he invented his own printing method, his own mythology and his own theology; a century later the Symbolists, the Surrealists and half of modern counter-culture claimed him as an ancestor.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.