Illustrations to the Book of Job, the Butts Set

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 (Butlin 162-164). 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 culminated in 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 engravings. These began as a series of reduced sketches executed in 1823 (Butlin 557); the engravings themselves, with a title page added, were not finished and published until 1826.

The Butts set of twenty-one water colors is presented here. Its dating is based on stylistic features, the history of commissions from Butts, and the presence, on two of the designs (5, 11), of Blake's near-monogram "WB inv," which Blake began to abandon c. 1806.

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 earlier dating of the Butts series, the basis for all the later works.