William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words, nor can a design be made without its minutely appropriate execution.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “To ‘generalize’ forms and shadows, to ‘smooth out’ spaces and lines in obedience to ‘laws of composition,’ and of painting; founded, not upon imagination, which always thirsts for variety and delights in freedom, but upon reasoning from sensation which is always seeking to reduce everything to a lifeless and slavish uniformity”
  2. “he finally escaped from ‘temptations and perturbations’ which sought to destroy ‘the imaginative power’ at ‘the hands of Venetian and Flemish Demons.'”
  3. “He strove to embody more subtle raptures, more elaborate intuitions than any before him; his imagination and technique are more broken and strained under a great burden than the imagination and technique of any other master.”
  4. “‘I am,’ wrote Blake, ‘like others, just equal in invention and execution.'”
  5. “No man can improve an original invention; nor can an original invention exist without execution, organized, delineated and articulated either by God or man”