The Work
William Blake's The Good and Evil Angels, a large color print made around 1795 and reworked in ink and watercolor, depicts two winged figures in violent contrast: a radiant golden angel to the right shelters a naked infant and steps away from a dark figure to the left, a chained, flame-engulfed being whose outstretched arm reaches toward the child with an expression of anguish, longing, and fury. The Good Angel's body is light and mobile; the Evil Angel is bound, burning, and heavy. Between them, or rather as the object of their contest, the small child leans toward light but seems held in both fields simultaneously.
Biblical Source
Blake draws on Revelation 20:1-3, where an angel binds Satan with a great chain and casts him into the abyss for a thousand years - but Blake's reading is characteristically revisionist. The binding is not a triumph of good over evil but a suppression of energy by convention, of imagination by law. The Evil Angel's chains, in Blake's mythology, represent not divine justice but moral constraint imposed by institutional religion. Revelation 20's binding is for Blake a symbol of everything wrong with the Christianity of his age, which he believed had confused the freedom of the Gospel with the bondage of law.
The Artist
William Blake developed the technique of color printing - pressing boards inked with pigment mixed with glue or gum to produce rich, textured monotypes - in 1795, producing twelve large prints including The Good and Evil Angels, Satan Exulting over Eve, Newton, and Nebuchadnezzar. The technique allowed for multiple unique impressions, each hand-finished differently, and the resulting images combine a painterly luminosity with a printed strangeness unlike anything else in European art. The 1795 color prints are generally considered the technical and imaginative peak of Blake's visual art.
Iconography
The composition encapsulates the central argument of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: that what conventional religion calls 'evil' - energy, desire, defiance - is in fact the necessary counterpart to 'good' - reason, restraint, law - and that the suppression of one by the other produces the paralysis that Blake called 'the mind-forged manacles.' The Evil Angel is not Satan in the conventional sense but Urizen, Blake's mythological figure of reason and law turned punitive. The Good Angel is not a divine messenger but a figure of protective imagination. The child between them is the human soul in the contested space of spiritual formation.
Significance
The Good and Evil Angels is among the most discussed images in Blake scholarship for what it reveals about Blake's theology of contraries and his revision of the Fall narrative. It places the spiritual conflict not in the external cosmos but in the interior life of the human being, where 'good' and 'evil' as conventionally defined are not absolute moral categories but psychological forces that can both oppress and liberate. The image has had a substantial afterlife in visual culture, including as an influence on Symbolist art and 20th-century graphic design.
The philosophical context of the Good and Evil Angels is Blake's sustained argument, developed across the illuminated books, that the conventional moral categories of good and evil have been systematically inverted by the institutions of church and state. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake writes: 'Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.' The 'good' angel in conventional terms -- orderly, rational, law-abiding -- represents to Blake the repressive force that imprisons the creative energy symbolized by the 'evil' angel's flames. The child between them is the human soul in its original innocence, before institutional morality has decided for it which principle to follow.
Blake produced the large color prints of 1795 using a technique of his own invention: printing from millboard inked with size-based paints, then working over each impression with pen, ink, and watercolor to add detail and intensity. The method produced prints of extraordinary richness and uniqueness -- no two impressions are exactly alike -- and the large scale of the prints (typically around 43 by 60 centimeters) gave them a physical presence and visual force quite unlike his smaller illuminated book pages. The 1795 series, which includes Good and Evil Angels alongside Newton, Nebuchadnezzar, and Elohim Creating Adam, is the most formally ambitious and thematically concentrated body of work in Blake's entire output.## Visiting Info
The primary impression of The Good and Evil Angels is in Tate Britain, London. Additional impressions are in the collection of the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Tate Britain's Blake holdings include many of the 1795 large color prints and are among the most significant Blake collections in the world. Entry to Tate Britain is free. The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, also has important Blake holdings.