een for instance in the expressive purity of "Penelope's Dream" (1792-93), had important repercussions throughout Europe. William Blake absorbed and outstripped the Fuseli circle, evolving new images for a unique private cosmology, rejecting oils in favour of tempera and watercolour, and depicting, as in "Pity" (1795; Tate Gallery, London [see photograph]), a shadowless world of soaring, supernatural beings. His passionate rejection of rationalism and materialism, his scorn for both Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Dutch Naturalists, stemmed from a conviction that "poetic genius" could alone perceive the infinite, so essential to the artist since "painting, as well as poetry and music, exists and exults in immortal thoughts." The spiritual, symbolical expression of Blake's complex sympathies, his ability to recognize God in a single blade of grass, inspired Samuel Palmer, who, with his friend Edward Calvert, extracted from nature a visionary world of exquisite, though short-lived, intensity. George Stubbs’s anatomical studies and accurate delineations of animals were echoed a generation later by Thomas Bewick's bird studies, themselves harbingers of the drawings of Edwin Landseer and Ruskin's closely observed renderings of naturalistic detail. Stubbs's empathy for the animal world reemerged in the work of James Ward, together with an exultation in the power of nature, shared by Philip James de Loutherbourg. Demand for information about distant places partially superseded the taste for picturesque European scenes, and following William Hodges, who accompanied Captain James Cook's second voyage (1772-75), such painters as Richard Parkes Bonington, Samuel Prout, John Frederick Lewis, and Edward Lear traveled widely, recording scenes of historic or exotic interest. In portraiture an interest in extremes of mood found most eloquent expression in the work of Sir Thomas Lawrence who combined in portraits suc...
