The Work
The fourth painting in William Blake's Great Red Dragon series, titled The Number of the Beast Is 666, is a watercolor created around 1805 as part of a series illustrating Robert Blair's poem The Grave. It depicts the vision of Revelation 13: the Beast rising from the sea, many-headed and crowned, receiving the worship of the nations while the Great Red Dragon - a massive, muscular figure standing behind - empowers the monstrous creature with its own terrifying authority. The beast spreads its wings and towers over kneeling human figures who represent the nations of the earth; above, the Dragon watches with predatory satisfaction.
Biblical Source
Revelation 13 is the source text: the Beast with ten horns and seven heads rises from the sea (Rev. 13:1), receiving the Dragon's power and authority (13:2), and the whole world worships it, saying 'Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?' (13:4). Revelation 13:18 contains the famous number of the Beast: 666, which ancient interpreters understood as a coded reference to the Roman emperor Nero, and which Blake read as a symbol of any earthly power claiming divine prerogatives. The Dragon empowering the Beast draws on Revelation 12:9, where the Dragon is identified as 'that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan.'
The Artist
William Blake produced his Great Red Dragon series - four watercolors illustrating the visions of Revelation - for the 1805 edition of Blair's The Grave, which Blake illustrated in full. The series is now divided between the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Brooklyn Museum. Blake was an intense and unconventional reader of Revelation, seeing its political-apocalyptic imagery as precisely applicable to the British Empire and the industrializing world of his own time. Thomas Harris's 1981 novel Red Dragon and its subsequent film adaptations made Blake's series globally famous in a context he could not have imagined.
Iconography
Blake's Dragon series develops a specific mythological figure absent from his earlier illuminated books: an embodiment of tyrannical power that combines the political, sexual, and spiritual dimensions of oppression into a single sublime image. The Dragon is not Blake's Urizen (reason) or his Nobodaddy (punitive deity) but something that incorporates all of them: empire, war, and the worship of power as ultimate reality. The worshipping nations reduced to kneeling submissiveness before the Beast visualize exactly what Blake meant when he wrote in Jerusalem that 'the worship of God is honouring his gifts in other men.'
Significance
The Great Red Dragon series represents Blake's most sustained engagement with the apocalyptic political theology of Revelation. The series has had an extraordinary afterlife: Thomas Harris's adoption of it as a key motif in his Hannibal Lecter novels introduced Blake's imagery to millions of readers worldwide, and the subsequent films (Manhunter, Red Dragon) made the paintings among the most recognized works of Romantic art in popular culture. The irony of art made to express liberation from tyranny being adopted as an emblem of serial murder is itself a Blakean paradox.
Blake's engagement with Revelation in the Great Red Dragon series reflects his reading of the Apocalypse not as a future prediction but as a permanent symbolic description of spiritual realities. The Dragon is not Rome specifically but the archetypal form of power claiming divine authority, always present in history, always generating the Beast of institutional religion and state power. The worshipping nations of Revelation 13 are humanity in its condition of idolatrous capitulation to these powers -- a condition that Blake saw operating in his own time through the British Empire, the established church, and the industrial revolution's transformation of human beings into cogs in an economic machine.
The four paintings in the Great Red Dragon series were created as illustrations for Robert Blair's poem The Grave (1743), a popular meditative poem on mortality that Cromek commissioned Blake to illustrate in 1805. Though the published engravings were executed by Louis Schiavonetti from Blake's designs -- a source of great bitterness to Blake -- the original watercolors survive as major works in their own right. The National Gallery of Art in Washington holds three of the four paintings, making Washington the best destination for encountering the series. The fourth -- this painting, The Number of the Beast Is 666 -- is in Philadelphia at the Rosenbach Museum.## Visiting Info
The Number of the Beast Is 666 is in the collection of the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Other paintings in the Great Red Dragon series are at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Brooklyn Museum. The Rosenbach also holds important Blake manuscripts, including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The National Gallery of Art is free to enter. The Brooklyn Museum has an extensive collection of Blake's illustrated books and watercolors.