Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Nurse's Song

William Blake

Relief etching printed in orange-brown ink and hand-colored with watercolor and gold

Metropolitan Museum of Art

This illuminated plate is one leaf from William Blake's celebrated combined edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, first published in its complete form in 1794. The plate presents the verse of 'Nurse's Song' from Songs of Innocence—a pastoral scene in which children playing in the hills are gently called home by their nurse, only to joyfully negotiate more time at play—accompanied by Blake's hand-colored decorative illustration that integrates text and image into a unified whole. Blake produced his illuminated books through a distinctive process of relief etching, printing the plates in colored ink and then individually hand-coloring each copy with watercolor and gold, meaning no two copies are identical. As one of the most iconic works of English Romanticism, Songs of Innocence and of Experience is recognized both as a landmark of literary history and as a masterwork of the book arts, reflecting Blake's visionary synthesis of poetry and visual design.