William Blake’s Illustrations for the Book of Job

Blake’s masterpiece of printmaking comprises a series of 22 prints engraved in pure line without preliminary etching. Created in 1826, these were based on the artist’s watercolours of the same subject from 1806 (Morgan Library, New York) and 1821 (Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard). Unlike these watercolours, the prints have complex marginal decorations that comment on the biblical text. Ruskin remarked that the work ‘is of the highest rank in certain characters of imagination and expression; in the mode of obtaining certain effects of light it will also prove a very useful example to you. In expressing conditions of glaring and flickering light, Blake is greater than Rembrandt.’