The Last Trumpet
Pen and ink and ink wash over traces of pencil
8 1/16 x 8 3/8 inches (20.5 x 21.2 cm)

Verso: in pencil, two studies of a right eye; a profile of an open-mouthed young man; the head of an eagle; the head of a lion, and the inscription ‘3/’

Collections: Mrs Blake; Blake’s executor Frederick Tatham (1805-1878); Sotheby’s 29 April 1862 (part of lot 173), bought by Francis Turner Palgrave; Pearson Catalogue 62 1886 (?); ? Sydney Style; anonymous sale Sotheby’s 23 March 1922 (lot 1208 with 7 Dante engravings), sold for £10 to Parsons

Literature: Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, 2 vols, London and Cambridge 1863, II, p. 248, no. 86 (list compiled by William Michael Rossetti); Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols, New Haven and London 1981, I, no. 617, p. 458; Martin Butlin, ‘A Blake Drawing Rediscovered and Redated’, Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, XXXIV, no. 1, Summer 2000, 22-24.

The Last Trumpet, lost since 1922, was acquired by the sculptor Frederick Tatham from Blake’s widow and subsequently owned by the poet Francis Turner Palgrave (Butlin 1981, I, no. 617, p. 458). The composition is related to a pencil Resurrection of the Dead dated by Butlin to c. 1780-85 (Ibid., I, no. 79, p. 30; illus II, fig. 77). The Last Trumpet was described by William Michael Rossetti as a drawing in indian ink,

An angel in the upper mid-plane of the design is blowing the trumpet, the tube of which comes forward in a conspicuous way. Souls, chiefly of women and children, are rising from the earth, and received by angels.

The Biblical passage represented is from I Thessalonians 4, 16-17

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

The lower right figure group in Blake’s drawing is repeated with some changes in The Day of Judgement etched by Luigi Schiavonetti for The Grave, a poem by Robert Blair published in 1808 (David Bindman, The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake, London 1978, plate 472). In his two volume catalogue of Blake’s work of 1981 Butlin had suggested the lost picture might be of c. 1805 and perhaps an illustration for The Grave, but when the drawing reappeared in 2000 he revised this opinion, recognising it to be an early work of c. 1785.