Like Cowper, Blake was often considered mad because he spoke so naturally of the visions that he had experienced since childhood. Friends from later life described evenings during which they watched him drawing religious or historical figures whom he said were sitting before him. In 1819 he began to record these visions for John Varley (1778–1842). This is the last of a series of six documented during the month of October. Varley recorded the details on the drawings. The Morgan also owns a visionary head of Christ.
This sheet is Blake's portrait of the fourteenth-century rebel and leader of the revolt against the poll tax, Wat Tyler, who had been killed in 1381. Perhaps Blake felt a kinship based upon his own antimonarchical stance that had led to a trial for sedition in Felpham a few years earlier.