Vicente (#713 IN RECENT RANKINGS), Vincenzo (#755), Vince (#1219) and Vincente are the prominent varying forms of Vincent (#107). “There has been a shift towards thinking about the visual aspects of his work much more,” he says. DEMOGRAPHICS) Vincent reached its top rank of #68 in the U.S. during the years 1910-1919, and is currently at #107. Blake is not too popular and is #135 in popularity in 2017. Vincent ▲ as a boys' name is pronounced VIN-sent. Far from celebrating the genius of Newton, a leading thinker of the scientific revolution, Blake’s often-reproduced colour print (which the Scottish sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi famously alchemised into a hulking bronze statue that guards the entrance to the British Library) is really an admonishment of lumbering rationality and misguided faith in scientific reason over what Blake believed were the more profound and liberating powers of the imagination. The name Blake means black, pale, white. We need a middle name blake _____ Davis. (2000 U.S. The Romantic painter and poet William Blake created some of the most iconic images in British cultural history – from a strange sidelong portrait of Isaac Newton, bent over naked at the bottom of the ocean, to an ebullient young boy flinging his arms out wide against a prismatic burst of colour to embrace a new dawn of human freedom. And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true. Not bad for an artist who was all but ignored in his lifetime, dismissed by many who knew him as insane, and died in poverty and obscurity in 1827. To that end, the Tate has reconstructed the very room in the Georgian hosiery shop in Broad Street, Golden Square, owned by Blake’s brother James, where the artist’s ill-fated one-off exhibition was staged between May and September 1809. “Obviously Blake is both a painter and a poet and that interplay has always been important. "Vincent" (Don McLean song), by Don McLean as a tribute to Vincent Van Gogh, 1971 "Vincent" (Sarah Connor song), by Sarah Connor, 2019 "Vincent", a song by Car Seat Headrest from Teens of Denial, 2016; Other uses in arts, entertainment, and media. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. More like this: - The artist revealing our ghosts - A brutal death in New York’s art world - The ultimate painter of war? It is only when we adjust our eyes to the small (46 x 60 cm) aperture through which Blake invites us to glimpse his submarine sighting of Newton that we appreciate the cramped and claustrophobic tensions that squeeze the work into meaning. and a comparison to Van Gogh's Actual Life. DEMOGRAPHICS), Vincent reached its top rank of #68 in the U.S. during the years 1910-1919, and is currently at #107. “The approach taken here,” Myrone writes, “is determinedly historicist and materialist. Below are the lyrics to Don McLean's hit song Vincent (Starry, Starry Night) From Vincentius. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. And yet, despite Blake’s occasional awkwardness as a draughtsman, his work is a case study in soulfulness over finesse, profundity over proficiency. The Ancient of Days, 1827: Living at a time of political oppression, Blake was a radical, his works offering a denunciation of Church and state – inspiring subsequent generations. Read about our approach to external linking. Freed from the tethers of its own inception, the work opens a conversation with its most obvious precursor, Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, which celebrates the exquisite proportions of the human body by illustrating the Roman architect Vitruvius’s observation that the anatomical extent of man conforms to a circle created by “a pair of compasses centred at his navel”.