18 February 2002

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of Blake's first group of twenty-one water colors illustrating the Book of Job. These were created on commission for Blake's major patron, Thomas Butts, as a series of nineteen water colors c. 1805-06; two further designs were added to the group at a later date, probably c. 1821-27. While Blake had drawn and engraved some important designs based on Job in earlier years, the Butts set of water colors is his first attempt to create a pictorial narrative of the whole story, from what Blake believed to be Job's misapprehensions about God, through Job's torments at the hands of Satan, to the restoration of Job's physical and spiritual wellbeing. The later set of Job water colors that Blake executed for John Linnell and the famous engraved series were both based on this earlier, Butts group.

The release of Blake's Job water colors is particularly significant because it marks our first publication of Blake's "Non-Illuminated Works." This new "wing" of the Archive will gradually be populated with Blake engravings, paintings, drawings, manuscripts, and typographic editions. In the near future, we will add such important works as the Job engravings and water color illustrations to the poetry of John Milton, Thomas Gray, and Edward Young.

In the interest of publishing the greatest number of high-quality images in the shortest span of time, we are introducing to the Archive a new "Preview mode." Like the current presentation of Blake's illuminated books in the Archive, works in Preview will be in full and accurate color, with enlargements, and with searchable transcriptions of any texts, including even the briefest of inscriptions. The only functions that will not be available in Preview are image search and Inote. Thus, works in Preview will not offer descriptions of visual motifs, nor will those visual motifs be searchable. The advantage of this slightly reduced mode of display is that we will be able to add works to the Archive more expeditiously. All works in Preview will bear a clear indication that they are indeed in "Preview," both in all relevant tables of contents and on the basic Object View page. As we add many works in Preview, we will gradually shift them toward fully functional displays that will make image search and Inote available. The Job water colors announced here are currently available in Preview mode.

At present the Archive contains, in addition to the Job water colors in Preview, 41 copies of 18 of Blake's 19 illuminated books, plus a fully SGML-encoded electronic edition of David V. Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. In the near future we expect to release more drawings and prints in Preview; a much-anticipated electronic edition of Jerusalem copy E, fully encoded for image search and Inote; and a collection of handlists for each of the Archive's contributing institutions as well as improved, searchable versions of our bibliographies. Future supplementary materials include a biography and glossary.

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 Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, by a major grant from the Preservation and Access Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, by 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 represent works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

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