The Work
William Blake's Satan Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve, a watercolor of approximately 1808 now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, depicts Satan coiled above the sleeping prelapsarian couple in the branches of a tree, watching their innocent mutual affection with an expression that has fascinated viewers for two centuries: it combines envy, anguish, desire, and impotent fury in a face that is unmistakably beautiful. Adam and Eve below are rendered in the flowing organic style of Blake's unfallen humanity - fluid, warm, entirely at ease with each other and with their world. Between the couple's paradisal ease and Satan's anguished watching, Blake creates the central dramatic irony of his Paradise Lost illustrations.
Biblical Source
Genesis 3:1 introduces the serpent 'more crafty than any of the wild animals,' but it is Milton's Paradise Lost, not Genesis, that provides the immediate narrative occasion: Satan entering Paradise, observing Adam and Eve, and forming the plan to corrupt them. Blake's illustration serves Milton's text but reads it through his own theological lens. The biblical background - Genesis 2:25, 'Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame' - underlies the image's central subject, the perfection of prelapsarian human intimacy that Satan's arrival will destroy.
The Artist
Blake produced three distinct series of Paradise Lost illustrations - for Thomas Butts around 1807-08, for John Linnell around 1816-20, and a single further set - making Milton's epic the biblical-literary text he engaged with most extensively through visual art. Satan is the most psychologically complex figure in Blake's entire body of work, and the Paradise Lost illustrations are the arena where that complexity is most fully explored. Blake understood Satan as a figure of great tragic energy who had made the error of identifying his own defiant power with ultimate reality.
Iconography
Blake's Satan in this painting is not the conventional horned devil but a figure of Luciferian beauty - the 'Son of the Morning' of Isaiah 14:12 before the fall rather than after it. This theological nuance distinguishes Blake from most pictorial interpreters of Satan, who show only the fallen and degraded figure. The serpentine coil in which Satan wraps himself anticipates his serpentine form in the temptation scene, but here he is still fully angelic, his tragedy visible in the contrast between his beauty and his anguish. The tree he inhabits is the Tree of Knowledge, its fruit still ungathered.
Significance
The Paradise Lost watercolors are considered the finest visual interpretation of Milton's epic in the history of art. Blake's engagement with Milton was profound and critical: he both admired and contested Milton's theology, believing that Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it' - meaning that Milton's Satan was far more energetic and interesting than his God. The watercolors embody this creative tension, depicting Satan with an imaginative sympathy that does not exonerate but does understand. The Boston impression is among the finest of the three series.
Blake made two complete sets of Paradise Lost illustrations: the first for his patron Thomas Butts (1807-1808), and the second, unfinished, for Reverend Joseph Thomas (1807-1808). The Butts series is the more completely finished, and the Satan Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve is one of its finest pages. Blake chose to depict moments in the poem that allowed him to develop his own theological interpretation rather than simply to illustrate Milton's narrative, and his Satan -- neither the heroic rebel of Romantic reading nor the grotesque monster of medieval iconography but a being of immense beauty and immense anguish -- represents one of his most original contributions to the Miltonic tradition.
The composition places Satan at the apex of a triangular design, his coiled form dominant but elevated above the couple below, who lie in a pastoral enclosed space of extraordinary tenderness. The contrast between the luxurious garden setting -- golden grass, entwined trees, the couple's perfect nakedness -- and Satan's dark, serpentine form observing from above creates a visual tension that the composition refuses to resolve: the paradise is real, the threat is real, and the viewer is positioned as a witness to the moment before everything changes. Blake understood this moment, theologically, as the instant at which Satan's own fallen consciousness -- his loss of the capacity for free love -- is most sharply defined by its contrast with the innocent love it cannot share.## Visiting Info
Satan Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The MFA holds several Blake watercolors and prints and displays them periodically in its works on paper galleries. Entry to the MFA is ticketed. The complete series of Paradise Lost illustrations for Thomas Butts was dispersed and is divided among multiple institutions; the Butts series includes impressions at the MFA, Huntington Library (San Marino, California), and other collections.