Nebuchadnezzar
The Work
Blake's Nebuchadnezzar (1795) is a large color print made by his unique method of planographic printing in which he painted a design in thick pigment on a millboard, pressed paper onto it to create a monotype impression, and then worked up the print with pen, ink, and watercolor. The result is a surface of astonishing textural richness: Nebuchadnezzar's body seems to grow out of the earth, his flesh taking on the quality of bark and stone. The finished print measures approximately 44 by 62 centimeters and is one of twelve large color prints Blake produced in 1795, which collectively address the fall of human reason into materialism. The Nebuchadnezzar is the most viscerally horrifying of these prints; its companion pieces - Newton and God Judging Adam - treat related themes with greater formal detachment.
Biblical Source
The image illustrates Daniel 4:33: 'That same hour the thing was fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar: and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws.' In the biblical narrative, Nebuchadnezzar had a dream warning him that pride would bring humbling; ignoring the warning, he boasted of his own greatness and was immediately struck with a condition - usually interpreted as a form of madness called boanthropy - in which he believed himself to be an animal. The affliction lasted seven years before he recovered, acknowledged God's sovereignty, and was restored. For Daniel the episode demonstrates that the Most High rules in the kingdoms of men and gives them to whomever he will. Blake's image captures the moment of lowest descent.
Artist and Commission
The twelve large color prints of 1795 were not made to commission but were produced by Blake as independent artistic statements, sold on an ad-hoc basis to collectors. Nebuchadnezzar was purchased by Thomas Butts and remained in his collection until 1853. Blake produced multiple impressions of most of the twelve prints, and there are several versions of Nebuchadnezzar in public collections. By 1795 Blake had published Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) and was working on his major prophetic books America, Europe, and The Book of Urizen. The large color prints represent his most ambitious foray into purely visual art - without the text that frames his illuminated books - and show him working at his greatest physical scale.
Iconography
The formal composition of Nebuchadnezzar exploits the tension between the upright human figure and the horizontally crawling animal posture. The king moves toward the viewer from the left, but his forward progress is not triumphant: he crawls on all fours, his enormous muscular body pressed low to the ground, his face turning back over his shoulder to meet the viewer's gaze with an expression that combines terror, shame, and desperate pleading. His hair and beard are matted and wild, his nails elongated into claws, but his body retains the physique of a powerful monarch - the transformation is not yet complete. The ground beneath him is dark and rocky, without vegetation or sky; his world has contracted to the bare earth. The choice of the backward glance is crucial: Nebuchadnezzar is not lost in animal obliviousness but remains conscious of his humiliation, trapped in self-awareness even within the bestial descent.
For Blake, the iconographic program of the print is clear: Nebuchadnezzar represents what Blake called Urizen, the personification of rational materialism and law-giving power that, when it denies the spiritual dimensions of existence and claims divine sovereignty for itself, is degraded into animality. The figure of the crawling king enacts the inevitable consequence of rationalist hubris: the attempt to master and contain the infinite produces not mastery but bestial reduction.
Art Historical Significance
Blake's twelve large color prints occupy an unusual place in the history of art: they are neither drawings, watercolors, engravings, nor oil paintings but a sui generis medium that Blake invented to produce images of particular richness and scale. The planographic method produced surfaces that anticipate the textural complexity of twentieth-century artists such as Max Ernst (who used similar frottage techniques). As a visualization of psychic states through physical posture, the Nebuchadnezzar anticipates Expressionism: the body is not a neutral container for the soul but visually enacts its spiritual condition. The print has been compared to Goya's contemporaneous images of human degradation (the Disasters of War series begins c. 1810), though there is no evidence of direct influence.
Theological Interpretations
For readers within orthodox Christianity and Judaism, the image illustrates one of the most dramatic humbling narratives in scripture - a pagan emperor brought to his knees (literally) by divine power. The theological point of Daniel 4 is the absolute sovereignty of God over all earthly rulers: no matter how mighty, they reign at the Creator's pleasure. Nebuchadnezzar's restoration after seven years of madness and his subsequent public acknowledgment of God's sovereignty (Daniel 4:34-37 is one of the most theologically explicit passages in the Hebrew Bible) frames the humbling as grace rather than mere punishment. Blake's image, by focusing entirely on the descent rather than the restoration, makes a different theological argument: the experience of humiliation is itself the necessary path to the recovery of spiritual vision. The crawling figure is not yet beyond redemption - the backward glance holds open that possibility.
Legacy
Blake's Nebuchadnezzar has become one of the most frequently reproduced images of the king in Western culture, appearing in countless studies of the Book of Daniel, of the history of madness, and of the relationship between power and degradation. It directly influenced the Nebuchadnezzar imagery in twentieth-century poetry, including Ted Hughes's Crow (1970), which engages the same Blakean mythology of rationalist pride and bestial reduction. The image has been used in psychological studies of boanthropy and in discussions of the theology of divine sovereignty. As a pure image of physical and moral humiliation, it has no equal in the Romantic period.
Visiting the Work
The primary version of Nebuchadnezzar is held at Tate Britain in London, where it is part of the permanent collection. A second impression is in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Tate Britain holds the largest public collection of Blake's work in the world, including the Newton and Elohim Creating Adam color prints, and a visit allows comparison of the full range of the 1795 series. The Tate's online collection includes high-resolution digital imagery.