Compared to orientalist painters, little is known about the discovery and use of religious images and objects from (or about) South Asia by modernist artists at the beginning of the 19th century. Yet it raises the question of the formal invention and power of non-Western arts, at a time when Orientalism (as discourse) tends to reduce them to the role of “antiques”, “worship objects” or “idols”. Such is the case of William Blake’s use of images from the collection of Edward Moor’s “The Hindu Pantheon” to draw and engrave his book “Jerusalem. The Emanation of the Giant Albion” (1804–1820). His interest in Indian forms is certainly part of his emancipation from the mimetic tradition of the West and therefore not devoid of any ideology. But can we stick to Frances S. Connelly’s interpretation of a link between artistic modernism and primitivism and state that by reinterpreting “the nonclassical as anticlassical and [by turning] the periphery as a weapon against the centre” Blake would only “underst[and] ‘primitive’ art in exactly the same ways as [his] contemporaries, but inverted the value ascribed to its characteristics” (Connelly 1995)?

Based on an in-depth analysis of some of Jerusalem’s plates, of their process and context of creation, the paper aims to contribute to the renewal of transcultural studies in art history and to bring to light a pattern of “trans-modernism”, in which dialogue is played out between forms as much as between form, theory and institutions.