Join us for an illuminating lecture by author Philip Hoare, for William Blake: The Age of Romantic Fantasy. No one can agree about him. William Blake was England’s greatest Romantic artist. Or was he Irish, as W.B. Yeats insisted?

Some thought he was a madman living in Bedlam. It took a long time for his genius to come through. The pre-Raphaelites, the surrealists, the modernists, the hippies, the punks, the new agers all laid claim to him. The fact is Blake is countercultural everything.

In his illuminated lecture, Philip Hoare draws on his new book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love (4th Estate) to discern the meaning of Blake’s monstrously beautiful imagining. How the natural and supernatural world combined in his art in protest against slavery tyranny and the abuse of animals, how he invented the fanzine, how he took issue with a patriarchal God, but walked the seashore with Jesus Christ, Mohammed, and John Milton. How his fantastical Tyger is in fact the fearsome spirit of revolution, how he was haunted by sea monsters, how his sensual pictures threatened to pervert Gerard Manley Hopkins and how Joyce’s Ulysses would have been nothing without Blake or his wife and co-artist, Catherine.
This is a portrait of the artist as a 269 year-old man, a Dr Who travelling in time and space, about to land in the National Gallery of Ireland in 2026.

Philip Hoare is the author of ten works of sort of non-fiction. His book, Leviathan, or The Whale, won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize. He swims every day in the sea.