An Alternative National Gallery: Blake’s 1809 Exhibition and the Attack on Evangelical Culture

This essay suggests that Blake’s 1809 exhibition was haunted by the memory of the Irish painter James Barry (1741–1806) and his concerns about the nation’s visual culture. In deciding to include The Penance of Jane Shore c.1793, Blake revisited the scandal associated with the writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) and her advocacy of women’s rights, resisting evangelical concerns about the body and sexual morality