Illustrations of the Book of Job

Blake's twenty-two engraved Illustrations of the Book of Job are the culmination of his long pictorial engagement with that biblical subject. 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 (Butlin 162-64). Another version of this subject appears among Blake's emblem series he sketched in his Notebook (Butlin 201.20), but the composition appearing in the wash drawings became the basis for the large intaglio etching/engraving, "Job" (Essick V), 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 (Butlin 394) c. 1799-1800 and, about six years later, a series of nineteen water colors illustrating the story of Job (Butlin 550, 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 (Butlin 551, 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 commissioning of the engravings, as set forth in a contract dated 25 March 1823. Blake first executed a series of twenty-one reduced pencil sketches of the central designs (Butlin 557). These he transferred to copperplates. Rather than using the customary "mixed method" of preliminary etching followed by engraving, Blake used pure line engraving in the Job plates. Perhaps one of his motivations was to evoke the art of the master engravers of the Renaissance whom Blake greatly admired, such as Albrecht Dürer. The Job engravings are generally considered to be Blake's masterpiece as an intaglio printmaker.

According to John Linnell, the border designs, unique to the engraved series, were a last-minute addition to the copperplates. Blake also added a title page, perhaps late in the production process. The title page is not numbered, but all the others are numbered, upper right in the copperplate, 1-21. The plate numbered "1" (object 3 here) was mistakenly dated 1828 in the imprint; all the others were dated 1825. Linnell's account books show that the engravings were not published until March 1826.

Blake follows the general outline of the story of Job in the Bible, but also incorporates into his designs many motifs representing his personal interpretation. At the beginning, Job and his family attend only to the letter, rather than the spirit, of God's laws. Job thereby falls under a false conception of God and into the hands of Satan. Job's sufferings are recorded in the first half of the series, culminating in his horrific vision of a devil-god in the eleventh design. Job's spiritual education and material restoration are pictured in the second half of the series. In the penultimate design, Job tells his story to his daughters; the entire family is restored to life in the final design. Some critics and biographers have interpreted the Job series as personal statements about Blake's own tribulations and the spiritual peace he found late in life. However appealing this approach may be, it is made questionable by the early dating of the Butts series, the basis for all the later series.