William Blake: Brothers' Bones Beside - Catalog - Page 16
To Illinois
Oil on linen | 70" x 36" | 2025
Blake’s painting imagines a quiet moment aboard the Sultana,
a steamboat carrying Union POWs home at the end of the
Civil War. Hours later, the vessel exploded, killing over a
thousand passengers in what remains the deadliest maritime
disaster in U.S. history.
Two identical figures, eyes closed, repeat across the surface.
Modeled on a friend of the artist and Civil War reenactor,
the doubling reflects Blake’s interest in memory not as linear
but looping.
Rather than depict the catastrophe, To Illinois holds in paint,
the moment of returning. The painting becomes a vessel of
its own, a form of preservation. n
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