Serge Arnoux's Mirror of Blake

Robert Campbell Henderson’s discovery in 2018 of a series of twenty-seven engraved copper plates, abandoned in a scrap metal yard in Sarlat-la-Canéda, is an occult event of note, a spark leaping between eras. On finding the plates, Henderson saw they were signed by a local artist Serge Arnoux (1933-2014) and recognised their texts as translations of William Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793). First published on the travellerintheevening.com website, in Serge Arnoux’s Mirror of Blake, Andy Wilson tells the story of the discovery of the Arnoux-Blake plates, of Arnoux’s various surrealistic works, the connections between Blake’s sexual imagery and surrealism, and the roots of Blake’s pietistic eroticism in the Moravianism of his mother. The Blake we see emerging is neither the done-dry Neoplatonist nor an early proponent of ‘mindfulness’ and a balanced lifestyle and moderation in all things, as imagined by recent commentators, but rather Blake the occult, revolutionary surrealist.