William Blake was nearly 66, poor, and mostly overlooked when a young painter named John Linnell commissioned him to engrave a set of Job illustrations in 1823. Blake had made watercolor versions of the story years earlier for his patron Thomas Butts. Now he turned them into twenty-one engravings, published in 1826, and they are widely seen as the peak of his engraving career. He died the next year.
This plate is the sixth, and it is the most disturbing. Satan stands over Job with arms spread, pouring out a vial of plague, while Job lies stricken on the ground and his wife kneels beside him. Satan is no horned goblin here. He is a muscular, nearly human figure with a radiant halo, which is the quiet shock of the image. He looks like an angel, and he looks like Job.
That resemblance is deliberate. Blake read the Book of Job as a story about a man whose faith had gone rigid, who trusted rules over experience, and whose god had become a harsh judge. In his own mythology, Job's suffering is partly self-made. The Satan of this plate shares Job's face because he is, in a way, Job's own mistaken idea of God.
Every plate has Blake's marginal decorations, including quoted verses, symbols, and tiny figures. Around this scene, the verses speak of the Lord giving and taking away. The border is not decoration. It is commentary, and it often disagrees with the central picture.
The sets were made for a modest sale, and few were sold in Blake's lifetime. Today they are among the most studied prints in English art.
Blake's Satan Smiting Job with Boils appears on our: