26.
To Thomas Butts.
Felpham, 6th July 1803.
Dear Sir,—I send you the "Riposo,"[1] which I hope you will think my best picture, in many respects. It represents the Holy Family in Egypt, guarded in their repose from those fiends the Egyptian gods.[2] And though not directly taken from a poem of Milton's (for till I had designed it Milton's poem did not come into my thoughts), yet it is very similar to his "Hymn on the Nativity," which you will find among his smaller poems, and will read with great delight. I have given, in the
- ↑ The picture has, unhappily, disappeared. It may probably be identified with a fresco until recently in the Butts collection, but which has now perished, together with a number of others (said to have been devoured by rats!). The latter is thus described in Gilchrist (1880 ed., vol. ii. p. 238, No. 161): "Tempera. The Holy Family are within a tent; an angel at its entrance; the donkey outside. Very dark by decay of the surface, and otherwise injured" (see, also, Gilchrist, vol. ii. p. 213, No. 43).
- ↑ The symbolical significance of the Egyptian gods is made clear by the following sentences (among those which surround Blake's print of the "Laocoon"):
"The Gods of . . . Egypt were Mathematical diagrams" (alluding to the supposed use of a canon of proportion for the humian figure by the Egyptian artists).
"Egypt . . . whose Gods are the Powers of this World: Goddess, Nature; who first spoil and then destroy Imaginative Art. For their Glory is War and Dominion."
"Spiritual war. Israel delivered from Egypt is Art delivered from Nature and Imitation."
