John Linnell

…the portrait and landscape painter John Linnell. Blake’s patrons were mostly concerned with his art, and most of his correspondence was about engravings and paintings. Only Cumberland bought a significant number of his books.

…his friendship with the artist John Linnell. Through Linnell, Blake met the physician and botanist Robert John Thornton, who commissioned Blake’s woodcuts for a school text of Virgil (1821). He also met the young painters George Richmond, Samuel Palmer, and Edward Calvert, who became his disciples, called themselves “the Ancients,”…