The Blighted Corn,

1821

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