20 September 2006

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of the Linnell set of Blake's water color illustrations to The Book of Job and the sketchbook containing Blake's reduced drawings preparatory for the Job engravings. The sketchbook is reproduced complete and in color for the first time. These two important sets of Job illustrations join the Butts set of water colors and the engravings, both previously published in the Archive. Thus, the Archive now includes all four series of Job illustrations. The engravings are fully searchable. The Linnell set of water colors and the sketchbook are presented in our Preview mode, one that provides all the features of the Archive except Image Search and Inote (our image annotation program).

Blake's pictorial engagements with The Book of Job extended over many decades. His first efforts were a small group of wash drawings of the mid-1780s showing Job in his misery with his wife and three friends. Another version of this subject appears among the emblem series that Blake sketched in his Notebook, but the composition appearing in the wash drawings culminated in the large intaglio etching/engraving, "Job," which Blake listed in his advertisement To the Public of 10 October 1793. This print may have stimulated Blake's chief patron, Thomas Butts, to commission a tempera painting, Job and His Daughters, c. 1799-1800 and, about six years later, a series of nineteen water colors illustrating the story of Job (the so-called "Butts set"). In 1821, Blake and his new patron John Linnell borrowed the water colors from Butts. Linnell traced the series and Blake colored them (the so-called "Linnell set"). Blake also added two more compositions to this later group and added versions of these same compositions to the earlier group, so that both sets now have twenty-one designs. The Linnell set led directly to his commission for the engravings. These began as a series of reduced sketches executed in 1823; the engravings themselves, with a title page added, were not finished and published until 1826.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible through the continuing support of the Library of Congress, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and by the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
William Shaw, project manager
The William Blake Archive