Frederick Tatham was born in 1805. He was the son of the architect Charles Heathcote-Tatham (1773-1842). His sister Julia eloped with her cousin, the artist George Richmond. Frederick was a sculptor, portrait painter and painter of miniatures. Art drew him to William Blake and he, together with other artists like Samuel Palmer, Welby Sherman and George Richmond, formed a group of painters, calling themselves ‘The Ancients’. They looked upon Blake as a seer, or Old Testament prophet come to life. Their admiration for early Renaissance art and their belief in the superiority of ancient over modern humanity, led them to form that artistic brotherhood, to which Edward Calvert and Francis Oliver Finch also belonged. Tatham’s works were characterised by their imitation of stiff early Renaissance styles, in the manner of the Shoreham Ancients, although his later work became more conventional. In a letter, Tatham describes Blake as: ‘Child­like, impetuous, fiery, indom­it­able, proud and ­humble.’ After Blake’s death in 1827, his destitute widow, Catherine Sophia Boucher appointed Frederick Tatham his literary and artistic executor. He has subsequently been dubbed a villain by historians and scholars alike for what he did with Blake’s works. According to Michael Rossetti, brother of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Tatham was ‘beset’ by ‘Swedenborgians, Irvingites, or other extreme sectaries’, and compelled to thrust ‘a gag into the piteous mouth of Blake’s corpse’. What they feared was that Blake’s paintings, manuscripts and engravings would disclose his intense, frequently obsessive and occasionally pornographic interest in sex. Blake left many drawings and manuscripts containing his most explicit sexual, religious and political expressions. Tatham felt obliged to destroy these. The loss was irreparable. Joined by Blake’s friend John Linnell, Tatham erased the offending words or images. When that proved impracticable, they resorted to a fig leaf. Blake’s original nude self-portrait for his Milton exhibited an erect and oddly blackened penis. One of Blake’s descendants mitigated the shock caused by the poet’s proud member, by drawing a pair of knickers over it. Modern technology has restored much of this censored material, and what emerges is a vivid recognition that for Blake, sex was at the centre of his spiritual and domestic life. Catherine nominally worked for Tatham as his housekeeper, but after she died four years ­later, in the arms of Frederick’s wife Louisa, much of Blake’s work and many of his plates came into Tatham’s possession. He claimed that these had been left to him by Mrs Blake, but there was no evidence to support such a claim. If such a bequest occurred it was probably oral. That claim brought him into conflict with Linnell, who insisted that Blake’s sister should have inherited them. Tatham also tried to extract paintings that Linnell owned, despite the fact that he had paid Blake for them. Shortly afterwards Tatham joined a millenarian sect, becoming a follower of the preacher Edward Irving, who momentarily captured the attention of London’s chattering classes. At that time, Tatham’s religious dogmatism led him to destroy a significant number of Blake’s works in the belief that they had been inspired by the Devil. Tatham later wrote his Life of Blake and whilst he certainly knew the man better any other Blake biographer, that eccentric work suffered from his own inability to understand the nature of Blake’s genius. He also edited and published The Letters of William Blake. He is known to have reprinted a number of copies of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience in the 1830s. Tatham certainly sold up to 200 of Blake’s works, some of them to the British Museum. However, he fell on hard times and went from living in Mayfair, attended by four servants, to renting a house in unfashionable Gospel Oak. He rented the house with his sister Harriet and three daughters. Apart from one daughter who was a draper’s assistant, Tatham was the only breadwinner – earning a pittance as minister of a church in Kentish Town. His sculpture and portrait studio closed and like his father, he too eventually went bankrupt. As his financial fortunes declined, Tatham sold off more and more of Blake’s work to support his family. He died at Gospel Oak in 1878 at the age of 73. His marble bust of John Scott, 1st Earl of Eldon (1830) may be found in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London.