William Blake

This sheet is the preliminary drawing for the rejected title page of Robert Blair's "The Grave", London, 1808. This drawing relates to another more finished drawing (reproduced in Geoffrey Keynes, Bibliography of William Blake, New York, 1921, facing page 219). The drawing on the verso may also be related.
Cromek commissioned Blake to make forty drawings for Blair's poem, proposing to have twenty of them engraved. In the end only twelve were actually engraved and, although Blake had expected to do the engraving himself, Schiavonetti did the work.