Blindness and Creativity in Romney's Milton and His Daughters

Attitudes to the blind and the nature of blindness changed dramatically during the eighteenth century. From a divinely ordained mark of transgression or conversion, blindness came to be understood as a philosophically curious and medically curable condition linked to epistemology and morality. The empiricism of Enlightenment approaches to blindness did not, however, dispel the idea that it could lead to deeper forms of perception and even creative genius. George Romney's Milton and His Daughters of 1793 visualizes John Milton's blindness by drawing on contemporary theories of sensory compensation, which associated blindness with heightened powers of concentration and imagination. This essay argues that Romney represents Milton's blindness as a sublime state of creativity and an embodiment of the doctrine of artistic invention.