The Good and Evil Angels

The outstretched hand almost reaches the child. Sweeping forward through red and gold flames, a muscular figure strains towards a fair-haired man who carries an infant against his chest. The man turns away while looking back; the child throws up both arms. At the lower left, an iron fastening interrupts the flying figure’s extended leg. Blake makes the encounter intensely physical before he allows it to become an argument about good and evil. ^[1]

The Good and Evil Angels belongs to his large colour prints: independent pictures made through printing, drawing and painting. Tate’s impression, N05057, bears Blake’s monogram and the date 1795, with the title written below the design. The museum gives its broader date as 1795–?c.1805. Colour printing combines with ink and watercolour on paper. These details open two questions. What makes either figure good or evil, and how did this particular sheet acquire the surface we see? ^{[1] [2]}

Reaching, retreating and holding

The two adults occupy almost the entire width. Their bodies have comparable force, but their movements run across one another. On the left, the airborne figure stretches his arms apart, one hand reaching towards the child while the other points back into the flames. His legs extend diagonally towards the lower corner. On the right, the other adult hangs more upright, with his feet above a pale, curling bank of cloud. His body turns away from the approach, even as his head turns towards it. ^[1]

The child makes that opposition consequential. Held across the man’s torso, the infant has one leg projecting towards the approaching hand and the other hanging down. Its small body occupies the space where the adults’ movements nearly meet. The raised hands can suggest alarm, while the adult’s encircling arms suggest protection. Yet the image does not show us an action completed: there is no seizure, exchange or escape. We remain in the interval before contact, assessing gestures whose outcome is withheld. ^[1]

Blake gives the chained figure an equally complex expression. His brow contracts, his mouth opens and his eyes are pale beneath heavy lids. The face can look tormented or intent. Its distress does not remove the force of the reaching arm, and the force does not settle whether the hand seeks to rescue, possess or harm. An interpretation has to account for both the figure’s power and the restriction attached to his ankle. ^[1]

The chain is small enough to miss at first. It darkens the lower leg and descends towards the ground, turning a magnificent flying body into a body whose movement is checked. The long diagonal of the leg draws the eye directly towards that interruption. Its importance grows as we follow the figure upwards again: the chest and arms press forwards, but the whole action carries a contrary pull. ^[1]

The surroundings amplify the conflict. Great tongues of flame follow the airborne body, curling above his head and below his reaching arm. Beyond the other figure lies a blue-green expanse, with a low sun touching the horizon. Dark ground occupies the foreground, and white-grey cloud curls between it and the suspended feet. Fire, water, earth and air gather into a compact space. They help organise the encounter without yielding an automatic code in which each element has only one moral meaning. ^[1]

Notice, too, how much the figures share. Both are naked and muscular; neither has the feathered wings that might make an angel immediately recognisable. The composition differentiates them through posture, colour, expression and setting. Their physical likeness keeps them related even while their actions separate them. That resemblance matters to a picture whose older interpretation concerns the division of an originally unified humanity. ^{[1] [2]}

Before the large print: a page in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The earliest related composition appears beneath the text of plate 4 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Tate’s catalogue dates that book context about 1790–93. The page is headed The voice of the Devil and attacks three supposed errors: a real separation between body and soul, the assignment of bodily energy to evil and reason to good, and the belief that God eternally punishes people for following their energies. The replies insist upon the body’s participation in soul and declare energy to be life. ^{[2] [3]}

The placement makes the little image unusually pointed. In copy D, held by the Library of Congress, the adult carrying the child stands on the left, while the fiery figure reaches from the right. The red sun, dark horizontal water, rising flame and wave-shaped foreground compress much of the later picture into a shallow strip. Immediately above it, the final numbered reply identifies energy with eternal delight. The reader sees bodily confrontation directly beneath a verbal challenge to the assumptions that might make one participant obviously virtuous. ^{[3] [15]}

The words on the preceding plate sharpen that challenge. Good and evil are introduced as names applied by religious judgement to passive obedience and active energy. Blake’s contraries include attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate. Their relation produces movement. Read in this setting, the confronting bodies cannot be explained satisfactorily by attaching the title’s two adjectives to them and stopping there. The text asks what those adjectives conceal about the life they classify. ^[3]

Blake subsequently developed the composition as a watercolour, placed by Butlin about 1793–94, before making the large print in 1795. Viscomi reproduces the watercolour, the book page and the two large-print impressions together in his 2022 essay on Blake’s graphic art. In the watercolour, the carrying figure remains on the left. The large print reverses that arrangement and greatly enlarges its expressive detail: the contracted face, the stretched fingers, the child’s twisting body and the fastening at the ankle become sustained objects of attention. ^{[2] [15]}

The passage between formats changes the viewer’s task. On the book page, words actively dispute the moral categories around the vignette. The independent picture has a title but no accompanying numbered argument. Its bodies must carry more of the debate themselves. Viscomi uses this sequence to explain how an image can draw meaning from an illuminated book and still function as an autonomous artwork. The large print rewards knowledge of the earlier page without requiring the viewer to treat it as an enlarged illustration with a single answer. ^[15]

Energy, restraint and the child

Tate’s 2011 label approaches the ambiguity through Blake’s annotations to Johann Caspar Lavater. Beside an aphorism praising the energetic person who chooses virtue over brilliant wrongdoing, Blake wrote: “Active Evil is better than Passive Good.” The beginning of his response acknowledges the aphorism’s nobility before pressing that objection. The remark belongs to a disagreement about what active moral life requires; its provocation loses some of its precision when detached from the statement it answers. ^{[1] [16]}

The concluding annotations make a further distinction. Blake describes hindering another person as a restraint upon action, and specifically includes murder and theft among such hindrances. Energetic conduct therefore cannot be equated indiscriminately with goodness. His argument tests conduct through the life it enables or obstructs. Applied cautiously to the print, it directs attention towards the difficult relations between reaching, holding and binding. The chain plainly restrains one adult; the child’s relation to both adults remains open. ^[16]

The Marriage supplies another pertinent image when its narrator describes giants who appear to live in chains. He identifies them as sources of the world’s activity and calls their bonds the contrivance of weak, tame minds. This gives the fastening at the ankle a powerful textual context: what looks dangerous or evil to an established order may be the energy on which that order depends. The connection supports Tate’s suggestion that the chain may represent misguided reason curtailing energy. It does not prove that every action of the chained figure is benevolent. ^{[1] [3]}

Later encounters in the book also unsettle an easy association between fire and punishment. One angel’s horrifying account of the narrator’s fate gives way, after the guide withdraws, to a pleasant riverside scene. Another angel eventually embraces a devil’s flame and undergoes a transformation. Fire can reveal the limits of an observer’s judgement or become the medium of change. These episodes help us approach the print’s flames with curiosity, while the child’s raised hands and the straining bodies keep the danger palpable. ^[3]

Orc, Los and a divided humanity

Martin Butlin’s 1990 Tate catalogue offers a more specific mythological reading. He identifies the fettered adult with Orc, associated with energy, and the carrying adult with Los, associated with imagination. The proposed identification depends on the development of related figures in Blake’s other designs. It is an argument about visual and imaginative continuity; Blake did not write a name beside each person in this picture. ^[2]

The story of Orc in The First Book of Urizen helps explain the significance of the fetter. Born to Enitharmon, the child grows until a painful girdle repeatedly forming around Los becomes linked iron. Orc is then chained to a rock with the bond of jealousy, while his voice wakes the surrounding life. The poem makes imprisonment arise within a relationship, even as the bound person remains a source of vitality. That context strengthens the connection between energy and restraint. It cannot turn the adult and infant in the print into a literal illustration of the poem’s younger Orc. ^[17]

The reading also complicates both names. Through Anne Mellor’s interpretation, which Butlin discusses, Orc’s energy has become a will to power; Los appears in a fallen, repressive form. Calling one figure Orc and the other Los would therefore leave the moral problem unresolved. Qualities that sustain human life can become destructive through division and domination. Butlin understands the encounter as a stage in the breaking apart of a previously unified human being. ^[2]

The child is the most tentative part of this explanation. Butlin acknowledges that there is no parallel for it in Blake’s contemporary writings and suggests that it may represent lost innocence, caught between the two fallen adults. That proposal gives an account of the child’s vulnerability without establishing a secure identity. The small body remains the focus of the viewer’s concern without a named identity, an established family relationship or a particular rescue story. ^[2]

Butlin also reads the lowered sun, compared with the earlier book design, as evidence of a more pessimistic outlook. The visible setting supports attention to diminishing light: the disc lies at the edge of the horizon while dark forms gather across much of the picture. The claim about Blake’s changing thought is a larger scholarly interpretation. Keeping the two together, while recognising their different scope, lets the landscape contribute to the emotional reading without turning a sunset into a complete biography of the artist’s beliefs. ^{[1] [2]}

Faces and the history of prejudice

Tate’s later label places a different pressure upon the figures. Its 2011 discussion reads their contrasting skin colour, build and facial appearance through eighteenth-century physiognomic and racial stereotypes. It connects the darker, heavier figure with demeaning descriptions of non-European people associated with Lavater, and the fairer figure with conventional claims for physical and intellectual perfection. This is the museum’s account of a historical visual hierarchy, whose prejudices require recognition when considering how the picture may have been read. ^[1]

The implications reach beyond deciding which angel represents which faculty. A vocabulary of bodily beauty and moral worth can make a judgement appear self-evident before the action has been examined. Tate’s interpretation asks us to notice that mechanism. It should neither be repeated as a truthful description of human groups nor treated as proof that skin colour reveals a figure’s ethical nature. The picture’s counterpressures remain visible: the supposedly inferior body has extraordinary force, and the supposedly superior figure participates in an unresolved struggle over the child. ^[1]

The changing impressions make this discussion still more demanding. The earlier large-print impression reproduced by Viscomi has a lighter, more openly coloured reaching figure, with less insistent dark modelling around the face. In the Tate sheet, the contours and shadows are stronger, and the pale eyes stand out more sharply. The contrast warns against treating every feature of the familiar reproduction as an unchanging property of the design. Colour and finishing affect the human encounter through which viewers begin to judge. ^{[1] [15]}

Two impressions, two surfaces

Tate records dimensions of 445 × 594 mm for its print. Butlin’s catalogue gives the same dimensions for the coloured image and records a larger sheet of approximately 545 × 760 mm. This was a substantial independent work on paper. The hand that nearly touches the infant, a small event in the earlier book vignette, now helps organise a composition almost sixty centimetres wide. ^{[1] [2]}

Viscomi places the two large impressions in sequence as first and second pulls, with Tate’s sheet second. His account of Blake’s monoprints distinguishes a repeatable composition from the individual colour transferred to paper and the work added afterwards. For this design, the comparison is especially revealing. Both impressions preserve the arrangement, but the first has broader areas of relatively open colour; the second gives muscles, faces and fingers more emphatic definition. Hand finishing participates in the picture’s expression. ^{[15] [18]}

Across the Tate surface, rougher, broken colour coexists with fine and forceful drawing. Dark lines articulate the chest, the bent wrist and the tendons of the chained leg. Smaller strokes define curls of hair and the infant’s features. The cloud below the upright figure has its own carefully differentiated edge, distinct from the dark triangular ground beneath the flames. These passages invite changes in viewing distance: the whole scene delivers its rush of movement, then individual marks slow us down. ^[1]

In his reconstruction of the large-print group, Viscomi places this design among those printed from prepared millboard. Colour painted onto the printing surface was transferred to paper and subsequently developed by hand. That proposed procedure accounts for the combination of irregular transferred paint and deliberate finish, but a reproduction cannot reveal the complete sequence of every mark. The actual surfaces establish difference; the account of how and when those differences arose belongs to material scholarship. ^[18]

A design of 1795 and a sale in 1805

The Tate sheet’s date has consequently received more than one explanation. Butlin thought it probably the second pull and considered both an early printing in 1795 and a later one about 1805. Its general appearance and a proposed relationship with God Judging Adam supported the earlier possibility in his catalogue. Tate’s broad date preserves the uncertainty instead of forcing invention, printing and completion into one moment. ^{[1] [2]}

Viscomi’s 2017 study places both impressions of The Good and Evil Angels in the 1795 printing. In his later 2022 essay, he explicitly describes Tate’s impression as refinished in 1805. This gives the strongly worked surface a history extending beyond the first transfer of paint: an earlier printed sheet could be developed for a patron a decade later. The proposal concerns the particular impression; it does not make every large colour print an object printed in 1795 and finished in 1805. ^{[15] [18]}

The patronage evidence is more definite than the precise printing sequence. For the patronage history, Butlin turns to an account Blake drew up with Butts on 3 March 1806. Its entry Good and Evil Angel is identified with this sheet. The document apparently records its delivery on 5 July 1805. Viscomi groups the work with three other prints in that acquisition. He links their similar monograms to his wider argument that Blake often signed independent works upon sale. He also proposes that the inscribed year dates the prepared printing surface, following a printmaker’s convention, so it need not record the transaction. ^{[2] [18]}

Watermarks elsewhere in the group help establish why such distinctions matter, but they must stay attached to their own sheets. The 1804 watermarks discussed by Viscomi belong to Tate’s Newton and Nebuchadnezzar. They are evidence for later impressions of those designs. Neither Tate’s entry nor the passages of Viscomi cited here report an equivalent watermark establishing a later printing of The Good and Evil Angels. Its chronology rests on a different combination of comparison, inscription and collection documents. ^{[2] [18]}

The Tate impression remained with Butts’s descendants before Captain F. J. Butts’s widow sold it to W. Graham Robertson on 2 June 1905. It was on loan to Tate from 1923 and became part of the collection through Robertson’s gift in 1939. The title thus leads to a particular sheet with a traceable later history, as well as to a composition surviving in another impression. The two should remain distinct whenever their colour or making becomes part of the interpretation. ^[2]

A possible companion, an unresolved encounter

Butlin proposed that the design could form a pair with God Judging Adam. In his account, that image presents the imposition of a single law, while The Good and Evil Angels presents the frustration of energy through division. The proposed connection makes their differently understood fires significant. It is a suggestive way of bringing two designs into conversation, conditional upon accepting the theory that Blake planned such pairs. ^{[2] [19]}

The companion’s own history adds a caution. God Judging Adam was long known as an image of Elijah, and Viscomi argues that Blake changed its meaning when preparing it for sale. A fixed sequence of meanings cannot simply be read backwards from the present titles. The Good and Evil Angels remains powerful within its own suspended action: a bound body reaching, another turning, and a child held between movements whose intentions the viewer must continue to examine. ^{[1] [18] [19]}