Illustrations of the Book of Job
The Work
William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job, published in 1826 as a suite of twenty-one engravings, is his most mature and fully realized engagement with a single biblical text. The cycle was first executed as watercolors for Thomas Butts around 1805-1806, then redrawn as a new set for John Linnell around 1821, and finally engraved between 1823 and 1826. Each plate is framed with marginal decorations - vines, text, and symbolic imagery - that extend and comment upon the central design in a synthesis of word and image unique in the history of illustration. The finished book measures approximately 28 by 22 centimeters and was issued in an edition of 315 copies, most of which were sold by subscription. Blake died the following year, in 1827, having seen this work - the culmination of his biblical art - through the press.
Biblical Source
The Book of Job is one of the most philosophically challenging texts in the Hebrew Bible: a righteous man subjected to catastrophic suffering with divine permission, his friends offering inadequate theological explanations, and finally God speaking from the whirlwind in passages of terrifying rhetorical power (chapters 38-41) before restoring Job's fortunes. Blake works through the entire book, beginning with the complacency of Job's prosperity and ending with reconciliation and music. He adds nothing to the narrative but transforms its meaning through visual interpretation. The marginal texts throughout quote primarily from the Psalms, Revelation, and the Gospels, placing Job within the full sweep of biblical theology. The famous Plate 14 - When the Morning Stars Sang Together - visualizes Job 38:7 as a vision of cosmic worship anticipating Revelation 4.
Artist and Commission
The commission for the final engraved version came from John Linnell, a painter and engraver who became Blake's most important late patron and virtual protector. Linnell advanced money against sales, enabling Blake to work on the plates without financial pressure. The relationship was practical and warm: Linnell introduced Blake to a new generation of younger artists - including Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert, who formed the group called 'the Ancients' around Blake - who revered him as a visionary master. Blake had illustrated Job several times before Linnell's commission; the biblical story of unjust suffering, divine challenge, and ultimate vision had preoccupied him since his youth. The engravings took approximately three years to complete, executed in Blake's 'white line' technique in which the design is incised into copper rather than built from cross-hatching.
Iconography
Blake's Job cycle opens with a deliberately ambiguous image: Job and his family sit in pastoral harmony, but their harps hang unplayed in the tree above them while their Bibles rest open in their laps - the emblem of religion as external observance rather than living worship. God and Satan appear as mirror images in Plate 2, a visual argument that the conventional God of religious law is Blake's Satanic Urizen. The descent into suffering - Plate 5's 'Then went Satan forth from the presence of the Lord' shows a figure of nightmare energy - is counterpointed by Job's spiritual development. Plate 11's famous image of Job's vision of Eliphaz's ghost anticipates the revelation to come: not theological argument but direct divine encounter. Plate 14 - the most celebrated single image in the series - shows Blake's magnificent vision of the answer from the whirlwind: a radiant God-figure with arms outstretched, surrounded by the morning stars and 'the sons of God' in rapturous worship. The final plate returns to music: the family now plays their harps, the instruments unbound, worship now internal and living.
Art Historical Significance
The Job engravings are among the most original works in the history of printmaking and biblical illustration. They influenced the development of the artist's book as a form - the integration of image, marginalia, and text into a unified aesthetic argument - and were a direct precursor to later illustrated editions by artists such as Gustave Dore. In the history of engraving, Blake's 'white line' method - producing luminous areas by incising the copper rather than drawing on it - was technically idiosyncratic and has no true descendants, but the plates demonstrate a range of tonal and spatial effects that confirm his mastery of the medium. The Blake scholar Northrop Frye, in his landmark study Fearful Symmetry (1947), argued that the Job cycle was the most complete visual embodiment of Blake's entire mythological and theological system.
Theological Interpretations
Orthodox readers find in Blake's Job a powerful visual commentary on theodicy - the problem of innocent suffering - and on the inadequacy of conventional religion's answers. The three friends who offer Job theological explanations are rendered as self-satisfied and visually imprisoned within the materialist world; Job's true redemption comes only when God speaks directly, bypassing explanation. Blake's own theological reading is more radical: Satan in the cycle is explicitly identified as Job's own false conception of God - the lawgiving deity who demands external worship - and Job's redemption is the discovery of the divine humanity within himself. The famous self-portrait of God in Plate 13 - showing God with Job's own facial features - makes this argument pictorially explicit. This reading anticipates twentieth-century psychological and existentialist interpretations of Job by figures such as Carl Jung (Answer to Job, 1952).
Legacy
The Job engravings were largely unknown during Blake's lifetime but became central to his growing reputation in the Victorian period, especially after Alexander Gilchrist's biography of 1863. They have since been the subject of more scholarly attention than any other Blake work save the prophetic books. The cycle influenced Samuel Palmer's visionary landscape, inspired John Linnell's own late biblical paintings, and shaped the tradition of serious biblical illustration in England. In the twentieth century, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams based his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930) directly on Blake's illustrations, extending the visual cycle into music. The paintings remain the touchstone for any engagement with the theological and artistic dimensions of the Book of Job.
Visiting the Work
The original watercolors for Thomas Butts are divided between the Morgan Library in New York and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. The Linnell watercolors are at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Original sets of the 1826 engravings exist in many major research libraries including the British Museum, the Huntington Library, and the New York Public Library. The Fitzwilliam periodically mounts exhibitions of the Blake watercolor series. High-resolution facsimiles of all 21 plates are available through the William Blake Archive (blakearchive.org), an invaluable digital scholarly resource.