Date: 26-11-2000
Owning Institution: Tate Britain
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 19th Century        

Two days before the 243^rd anniversary of William Blake’s birth, this week’s picture is The Ghost of a Flea, one of a number of “visionary portraits” that he drew and painted, late in life, under the encouragement of the watercolourist and astrologer John Varley.

Varley described how the artist came to create this image of bloodthirsty malignity. The “Personified Flea”, he wrote, was a spirit who “visited Blake’s imagination in such a figure as he never anticipated in an insect. As I was anxious to make the most correct investigation in my power of the truth of these visions, on hearing of this spiritual apparition of a Flea, I asked him if he could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw. He instantly said ‘I see him now before me.’ I therefore gave him paper and a pencil, with which he drew the portrait… I felt convinced, by his mode of proceeding, that he had a real image before him; for he 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.”

As Blake worked, he conversed with the being he claimed to see before him, much as any portrait painter might chat with his subject. “The Flea told him that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of such men as were by nature bloodthirsty to excess, and were therefore providentially confined to the size and form of insects; otherwise, were he himself, for instance, the size of a horse, he would depopulate a great portion of the country.” Having imparted this reassuring information to the artist, the vision disappeared. Blake continued to work on the picture in silence, giving his monster its distinctive gold-green colouring, placing it in an environment somewhat suggestive of a stage with curtains, and decorating the background with some stars – a detail added in deference to Varley’s theory that the fate of the creature must have been written in its horoscope. The flea, Varley declared on first seeing Blake’s drawing, was certainly a Gemini.

The notion that people might be reincarnated as animals was a familiar one to Blake. He knew and admired one of the key figures in the Celtic revival, the poet and stonemason Edward Williams, better known by his bardic name of Iolo Morganwyg, who claimed to remember previous lives as (among other things) a druid and a sheep. The metempsychotic nature of Blake’s flea accounts for its metamorphic nature, half human, half insect. It clutches the symbols of its own compulsion, sting like a dagger concealed behind its back, and a bowl to catch the blood which it craves.

Blake had been introduced to John Varley, a genial 17-stone bear of a man some 30 years his junior, in the autumn of 1818. Varley believed passionately in the existence of spirits but was frustrated by his inability to see them. He was fascinated by Blake, who claimed to have experienced visions every day of his life ever since the moment when, as a young child walking on Peckham Rye, he had seen “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” Varley’s enthusiasm and touching inability to handle the practical side of life – he was imprisoned for debt several times, according to a biographer, and “his house was burned down on more than one occasion” – seem to have struck a chord with the similarly unworldly Blake. A year after their first meeting they embarked on their visionary experiment. Blake would come to Varley’s studio every evening, waiting for visions to materialise and then drawing them, one by one, as they appeared: Richard the Lionheart, “The Man who built the Pyramids”, Mahomet, Edward I, King Saul (who obligingly came back from the dead twice so that Blake could copy his unusually ornate armour) and, of course, the ghost of a flea.

Many commentators have assumed that the painter-poet was playing an elaborate practical joke on his gullible young friend. Sceptics point to the questionable ease with which Blake summoned up his visions of spirits and the dead. More than once Varley suggested a subject – Achilles, for example – only for that very individual to appear as if by appointment. There is also something suspiciously hucksterish about Blake’s professions of difficulty while working, his habit of pausing on the pretext that his subject had moved (or opened his mouth, as in the case of the man-flea). Aptly, perhaps, The Ghost of a Flea recalls not only the theatre but also the dark and cramped setting of a fairground entertainer’s booth.

Blake encouraged Varley to believe that his visions were “real” and “true”, although just what those words might mean in a Blakean context is open to debate. The artist had an extremely vivid imagination and a highly acute visual memory, and in the case of many of the “visionary portraits” it is clear that he drew on images that he knew and had remembered. His portrait of Queen Eleanor, for example, closely resembles her effigy in Westminster Abbey, which he had copied in his youth. His visionary flea, likewise, is plainly derived in several details from the memory of an image he had seen, namely a celebrated engraving of a flea as seen under a microscope which was published in Dr Robert Hooke’s pioneering scientific work, the Micrographia.

Varley thought that Blake could show him what spirits or famous, long-dead people like Edward the Confessor had actually looked like. Doubtless the artist enjoyed being thought of as a man with supernatural gifts. He himself seems to have believed that he had the powers of a medium. But Varley’s interpretation of his work was probably over-literal. Blake sought to convey poetic truths that lay beyond the realm of physical appearances and spent his life attempting to represent, in word and image, that which cannot be seen by the naked eye. Like his equally famous and fantastical depiction of a naked Isaac Newton, compasses in hand, embodying the spirit of cruel and detached calculation, The Ghost of a Flea is most intelligibly viewed as a kind of metaphorical, metaphysical portrait – Blake’s way of depicting a certain mental state or condition, albeit a rather vicious one.