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Original fileTwo shepherds, one youthful and one elderly with a long white beard, stand leaning on their crooks in a textured pastoral landscape. In the background, a third figure is depicted in mid-stride, silhouetted against a dark, hatched sky as he runs across the horizon. The image is a wood engraving characterized by expressive, energetic white lines cut directly into the dark block to create a sense of vibrating light and shadow.
These woodcuts for Thornton's Virgil represent a pivotal moment in the history of visionary art, where Blake abandoned technical polish for raw, spiritual intensity. They served as a primary inspiration for 'The Ancients,' a group of artists including Samuel Palmer who sought to find a mystical, Neoplatonic 'Eden' within the British landscape.
COLINET and THENOT.
Robert John Thornton
Blake produced this series of woodcuts to illustrate Thornton's 1821 edition of 'The Pastorals of Virgil.'
Samuel Palmer
Palmer viewed these specific engravings as 'visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise,' influencing his own mystical landscape style.
Object
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
paper
height 32 mm x width 73 mm
landscape
Linked Data
AI AI-cataloged fields generated by gemini-3-flash-preview on April 2, 2026. Getty identifiers are AI-inferred and may require verification.