Thenot and Colinet Seated between Two Trees,

1821

In 1819, William Blake was commissioned to provide a series of illustrations for The Pastorals of Virgil, with a Course of English Reading for Schools, edited by Robert John Thornton. This grade-school primer included “Thenot and Colinet,” a poem written in 1748 by the British writer Ambrose Philips as an imitation of Virgil’s first Eclogue, composed by the Roman poet between 44 and 38 B.C. in praise of the moral and spiritual virtues of pastoral life. Although Blake’s illustrations to Philips’s stanzas are miniscule in scale and childlike in their simplicity, these wood engravings had a profound influence on subsequent British artists, who admired their medieval appearance.