He Painted the Ghost He Saw in the Room: William Blake's Ghost of a Flea

One night in eighteen nineteen, in a house in London, the painter William Blake stared into the corner of a room and said he could see a ghost. It was not the ghost of a man. It was the ghost of a flea.

A friend sat beside him, the only witness. He later described what Blake saw: an eager tongue whisking out of its mouth, a cup in its hand to hold blood, and a scaly skin of gold and green. Blake drew it on the spot, and while he drew, he said, the ghost began to talk.

Blake turned that night into one of the strangest paintings in British art. And two hundred years later, nobody can say for sure whether he believed he had really seen it.

This is that painting, and the ghost is still standing in it. So before we ask whether Blake really saw it, let us look at what he painted.

At first, we see a small dark stage, and a huge, muscled creature striding across it, far bigger than any flea has a right to be.

And yet, what makes this painting so strange is not the monster, but the man who said he saw it. So what did William Blake see in that room?

This painting is called The Ghost of a Flea. Blake painted it around eighteen twenty, and today it belongs to the Tate in London. On a screen, it looks enormous. In real life, it is about eight inches tall, smaller than a sheet of paper, painted with real gold on a little panel of wood.

The only witness to that night later printed his proof, in a very strange book. And Blake himself had already answered our question, twenty years before the flea appeared.

So in this video, we are going to find out what Blake saw in that room. And to understand that, we first need to know who William Blake was, and why so many people already thought he was seeing things.

William Blake was born in London in seventeen fifty-seven, the son of a man who sold stockings. When he was eight or ten, as he told it later, he looked up at a tree and saw it filled with angels. He ran home and told his parents, and his father nearly beat him for telling a lie.

At fourteen, he was sent to learn engraving, and that trade paid his rent for the rest of his life. And in his spare hours, he painted his visions, like this one, of God measuring out the world with a pair of compasses.

In eighteen oh nine, Blake put on a show of his own paintings. A single newspaper reviewed it, and it called him an unfortunate lunatic.

Ten years later, Blake was sixty-one, living with his wife Catherine in rented rooms in South Molton Street, poor and almost forgotten. Then he met a man called John Varley. Remember that name, because Varley would become the only witness to the ghost of a flea.

Varley was a cheerful, enormous landscape painter, and also a professional astrologer, who read people's futures in the stars for a fee. More than anything, Varley longed to see a ghost. Once, a friend's house was troubled by eerie noises at night, and Varley was thrilled, until the family found the cause. It was a loose cover on the chimney, and Varley was bitterly disappointed. Hold on to that chimney, because it will matter later.

Varley had never seen a spirit in his life. Blake said he saw them all the time. And so, in the autumn of eighteen nineteen, the two men began to meet at night.

They met at Varley's house, from about ten in the evening until three or four in the morning. Varley would call out a name from history, something like, draw me Moses. And Blake would answer, there he is, and start to draw, looking up now and then, as if someone were really sitting in front of him. Varley stared into the empty air beside him, hoping to see something too. He never did.

Blake drew dozens of heads this way, and Varley wrote the date on many of them, like a scientist recording an experiment. This one, he noted, was the Man who built the Pyramids.

And one of those nights, the visitor was a flea. So when Blake mentioned the flea, Varley handed him paper and a pencil, and Blake said at once: I see him now before me.

Then something happened that convinced Varley completely. Halfway through, Blake stopped, moved to another part of the paper, and drew the creature's mouth on its own. The flea, he explained, had opened its mouth, and he could not go on until it closed it again. To Varley, this was proof that Blake had a real image in front of him.

And while Blake drew, the flea talked. It said that fleas carry the souls of men who were bloodthirsty beyond measure, and that is why they are kept so small. If a flea were the size of a horse, it said, it would empty a great part of the country.

Later, Blake gave it a painting of its own. So let us look at it again, slowly.

First, the stage. Notice the wooden floor under its feet, and the curtains pulled back on either side. Blake has not put the flea in a room or a field. He has put it in a theatre, as if the curtain has just gone up.

Then the creature itself. Its skin glitters with gold and green, like the scales of a fish. Its head is small for such a huge body, and it turns to the left, with that tongue pushed out, as if it can already smell something.

In one hand, it holds out that cup for blood. And behind its back, almost hidden in the dark, its other hand grips a long thorn, the kind of point that could pierce skin.

Finally, look down to the left, where a bright star is falling through the night with a pale green glow behind it. And in the corner on the right, Blake signed his name.

It does not look like a quick sketch of a bad dream. So what did William Blake see in that room?

Before we answer that, a quick word from us. If you would like The Ghost of a Flea on your own wall, you can now order it as a print from our website. You will also find The Ancient of Days and the other Blake paintings from this video. Every print helps us keep making videos like this one.

Now then, let us continue. What did William Blake see in that room?

The answer starts with the witness. Nine years after that night, John Varley published his own account. He wrote that he wanted to make the most correct investigation he could into the truth of these visions.

Remember the chimney? Varley wanted to see a ghost so badly that a loose chimney cover had broken his heart. Now he finally had one, and he put it in print. Varley did not print this story in a book about art. He printed it in a book about astrology, which claimed you could read a person's face from the stars they were born under. The ghost of a flea was part of his evidence.

A few years later, the writer Allan Cunningham retold the story, and even he was torn. These stories are scarcely credible, he wrote, and yet there can be no doubt of their accuracy.

So everything we know about that night comes from one witness, who wanted more than anything to see a ghost. That leaves us with two ways of reading it.

In the first, which is Varley's, the spirit was really there, and Blake simply drew what stood in front of him.

The second comes from Blake's first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist. Blake's friends noticed that every one of these ghosts looked a little like the faces Blake always drew. And when anyone criticized a head, Blake would calmly answer, it must be right, I saw it so.

And Blake himself had already explained. Twenty years earlier, he wrote to a customer who did not like his pictures. I see every thing I paint in this world, he wrote, but every body does not see alike.

That may be the real answer. Perhaps Blake did see the flea, the way he saw everything he painted, with his imagination wide open. And he never pretended that seeing worked the same way for everyone else. It is what the boy who saw angels in a tree had tried to tell his father, fifty years before.

A newspaper had once called Blake a lunatic. Yet in those same years, in one small room, Blake made his pictures for the Book of Job, some of the greatest work of his life. This is one of his paintings of that story, Satan striking Job with sores.

Blake died in eighteen twenty-seven, still working. Varley kept the little flea in a private drawer, and showed it to visitors as the greatest curiosity of all. In nineteen forty-nine, it was left to the Tate.

Today, the museum calls it the stuff of delirium and nightmare. Blake would probably have put it more simply. He saw it so.

So now, I would love to know what you think. Did William Blake really see the ghost of a flea? Yes or no? Tell me in the comments.

And if you like a mystery with no ending yet, the next story is about a painting that was stolen and has never been found. That story is right here.