Title: Portrait of William Cowper

Height 7.3 cm, width 6.2 cm
Watercolour on vellum
William Blake
Provenance: Hayley to his mother-in-law, whose sister Harriet then gave it to Johnny Johnson; purchased from Bonhams 2006
Museum No. OLNCN.3934

This is a copy by William Blake (1757-1827) after the portrait 'William Cowper' 1792 by George Romney (1734-1802) in the National Portrait Gallery (Museum No. 1423). Drawn in pastels, the original portrait shows Cowper wearing the linen cap given to him by Lady Hesketh.

The work was copied for the frontispiece engraving to William Hayley's Life and Posthumous Writings of William Cowper, 1803-4. William Hayley (1745-1820) had met Cowper in 1792 and wished to commemorate their friendship through a portrait by Romney. Hayley described Romney's wish to execute a portrait of Cowper:

Romney was eager to execute a portrait of a person so memorable and in drawing it he was particularly desirous of making the nearest approach to life that he possibly could: for this purpose he chose to make use of coloured crayons, a mode of painting in which he had indeed little experience... He worked with uncommon diligence, zeal and success, producing a resemblance so powerful, that spectators who contemplated the portrait with the original by its side, thought it hardly possible for any similitude to be more striking, or more exact.'(1)

Blake had been introduced to Hayley by the sculptor John Flaxman, RA (1775-826). With the death of his son, Hayley moved to Felpham in Sussex where Blake settled near him for three years to engrave the illustrations for the Life of Cowper. This, Hayley's best known work, was published in 1803-4 (Chichester) in 5 vols. Blake also illustrated Hayley's Ballads on Animals, 1805. Blake was to meet with little success with his own work prior to 1818 when John Linnell (1792-1882) commissioned watercolours from him to illustrate the Book of Job.

(1) W. Hayley, Life of George Romney, 1809 (which also includes an engraved plate by Wm. Blake).