The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun

A woman opens her arms beneath a creature whose wings almost fill the sky. Light gathers around her head and runs through the yellow folds of her dress. Above her, a horned face turns down between a muscular chest and a mass of other heads. The dragon appears to plunge towards her, yet the same broad gesture joins the two figures: both spread their arms across the picture, both possess enormous wings. William Blake makes their confrontation frightening partly through that resemblance. Their bodies answer one another while their movements and colours pull them apart. ^[1]

This is the watercolour in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, dated about 1805 and catalogued as Butlin 520. It differs from the similarly titled Brooklyn picture, in which the dragon presents his back to us. Here the woman's wings and the surrounding flood carry the story into a later phase of Revelation 12. The threatened birth has already given way to pursuit, protection and escape. Looking carefully at those differences reveals a struggle more complex than the instant before a monster attacks. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

A dragon falling into the picture

Begin with the creature's central face. Its forehead tips towards the woman, while the crown and curled horns make a hard, bright knot near the middle of the upper half. The arrangement of the other heads becomes clearer with time. Profiles emerge beside the neck and shoulders, each turning in a different direction. They seem to grow from a single powerful body without settling into the orderly spacing of a row. This multiplication makes the figure difficult to grasp at once: the eye keeps discovering another face within what first looked like a mass of flesh and horns. ^[1]

The torso remains recognisably human. A broad chest, rounded shoulders, an extended arm and a clenched foot bring the creature close to the anatomy of an athletic man. Then the wings and tail break that familiarity. Long membranes stretch away from the shoulders, carrying reddish bands and dark ribs towards the edges. The wings exceed the space available to them. Their upper portions disappear beyond the picture, so that the dragon's reach seems larger than the sheet can contain. The effect gives his arrival an abrupt, invasive force. ^[1]

His posture works against the woman's. She rises upright from the ground, her neck extended towards the light; he hangs above her, with the head descending from the mass of his body. One foot is visible near the centre, another towards the right, while the long tail curls down and around to the left. These unevenly distributed parts disturb any simple symmetry. His widely spread arms belong to a body caught in motion, bringing enormous weight towards the small interval above the woman's head. ^[1]

The tail supplies a slower, more insinuating movement. Its rounded coils pass across the dark background, close to the upper edge of the woman's light. Reddish colour runs along their surfaces, connecting them with the wings without making the creature uniformly red. Grey, brown and cooler shadows occupy much of his body. The biblical name gives the dragon a colour, but Blake's image lets that colour move through a complicated anatomy. Warm passages can seem almost fleshlike until a horn, claw or coil restores the sense of a monster. ^{[1] [2]}

That mixture matters to the encounter. A remote, unfamiliar beast might be easier to keep at a distance. Blake makes the dragon's menace bodily and close. The arms have hands, the legs have feet, and the principal face belongs to a being capable of expression. At the same time, the many heads disrupt the unity we expect from a human body. Physical magnificence becomes disturbing when it carries so many competing directions within itself. The figure's power is immediately visible; its coherence is much harder to secure. ^[1]

The woman's light and open hands

The woman occupies a different kind of space. Her dress spreads in long curves across the rock, and her wings gather around her in two large, rounded forms. Their golden colour makes a luminous enclosure within the darkness. The outline curves outward beside each shoulder and returns towards her lower body, giving her a protected centre even while her arms extend beyond it. Against the dragon's sprawling, many-part anatomy, she appears concentrated and continuous. ^[1]

Her face turns sharply upwards. Hair and light rise together around it, so that the head seems to emit a flame-shaped radiance. The brightest passages occur where the face, neck and upper chest meet that glow. Lower down, yellow folds lead towards the dark support. Blake carries light through the figure instead of setting a detached sun behind her. The scriptural description of a woman clothed with the sun becomes a condition of her whole visible presence. ^{[1] [2]}

Look at her hands. The arms extend, but the wrists bend back and the palms remain open. She holds no weapon and makes no visible effort to seize the dragon. Her gesture can suggest alarm, appeal or an acceptance of protection, without the picture resolving those possibilities into a single expression. The face looks towards the danger, while the open hands expose the body to it. Her vulnerability is unmistakable, but so is the breadth of the gesture. She occupies the lower half with an expansive presence of her own. ^[1]

The crescent beneath her gives that presence a precise biblical anchor. Revelation opens the vision with the moon under the woman's feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. Blake makes the curved form under her easy to recognise, while the detail around her radiant hair is less readily counted in an ordinary reproduction. The text supplies a precise enumeration; the painted radiance makes a broader visual impression, gathering the head into a crown of light. ^{[1] [2]}

The two sets of wings give a further reason to linger. The dragon's membranes fan out through the upper corners; the woman's wings bend around her body. His forms press beyond the boundaries, while hers establish an interior. These are differences in shape and direction before they become moral distinctions. They let Blake organise the opposition through the experience of looking: one figure spreads into the surrounding world, the other sustains a luminous place within it. ^[1]

The part of Revelation Blake chose

Revelation 12 tells its story through a succession of events. A pregnant woman appears in heaven, clothed with the sun. A dragon with seven heads and ten horns waits to devour her child. The child is born and taken to God's throne; the woman flees into the wilderness. War follows in heaven, where Michael and his angels overcome the dragon. Cast down to the earth, the defeated creature pursues the woman again. ^[2]

At this later point, the text gives her the means of escape:

And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle. ^[2]

Those wings are crucial to the Washington watercolour. They belong to verse 14, after the birth, the child's removal and the battle in heaven. The streams around the woman take the sequence further. In verses 15–16, the serpent sends a flood from his mouth to overwhelm her, and the earth opens to receive it. Blake brings the winged woman, her pursuer and the rushing water together. The picture's danger occurs within a narrative that has already provided protection and will continue to frustrate the dragon. ^[2]

The Gallery records wording above the image: “The Devil is Come Down”. That phrase recalls the warning in verse 12 and helps distinguish the scene from the earlier threat to the newborn child. The record also transcribes an incomplete phrase concerning the serpent below the image. These surrounding words belong to the object's documented presentation, although the record does not establish that Blake himself wrote these surrounding inscriptions. The painted wings and flood remain the clearest visible guides to this stage of the story. ^{[1] [2]}

This sequence changes how the absent child should be understood. There is no need to imagine that the dragon has already consumed him, or that Blake has forgotten the central object of the opening threat. The biblical child has been taken beyond the pursuer's reach. The conflict now concerns the mother's survival. By giving her the lower half of the composition, Blake makes that survival a substantial subject in its own right. The viewer encounters her exposed body, light and gesture before reconstructing the events that have brought her here. ^{[1] [2]}

The narrative also complicates the apparent balance of power. The dragon commands the upper space and possesses overwhelming muscles and wings. In the biblical account, however, he has already lost a battle. His renewed violence belongs to a defeated being who still has the capacity to harm. The woman looks endangered because the threat is real within the story, but her wings announce that she has received help. Blake holds those two conditions together. The terror of the encounter remains visible without cancelling the possibility of deliverance. ^{[1] [2]}

Water, rock and the figures at the edge

The water moves through narrow channels of brightness. White and pale grey strokes zigzag through the darker ground on either side of the woman. They are especially striking because so much of the central composition is built from broad, curved forms. Wings, shoulders, coils and folds create large sweeps; the rushing streams cut into that movement with angular interruptions. Their broken direction makes the surrounding space feel unstable. ^[1]

Revelation gives the flood a purpose: the serpent sends it to carry the woman away. The painted water therefore participates in the attack. In the Catholic University of America's Honoring Mary project, the student curators identify these zigzagging streams with the flood of verses 15–16. Their reading restores a narrative action that can disappear when attention rests entirely on the dragon's physique. The danger comes through the setting as well as through the hovering body. ^{[2] [15]}

The rock beneath the woman creates a contrasting interval. Its broad dark face supports the luminous folds and the pale crescent, holding the figure above the churn around her. It looks firm within a world of moving wings and water. That visual stability can be read beside the scriptural statement that the earth helps her, although the picture does not show a plainly labelled mouth opening in the ground. Blake gives the landscape an active role without spelling out every stage of the text as a separate incident. ^{[1] [2]}

Small figures appear near the lower right, turned upwards towards the encounter. Their heads and shoulders emerge from a crowded, dimmer zone, far below the principal dragon's face. They provide another measure of scale. The woman's body seems large beside them, while the creature above extends across almost the whole width. Their presence prevents the scene from remaining an isolated exchange between two emblems. Others occupy the threatened world and look towards what is happening. ^[1]

Their identities are less certain than their visual function. The surrounding chapter ends with the dragon going to war against the rest of the woman's offspring, but that passage alone cannot securely name each painted person at the edge. What can be followed is the direction of their attention. Their upward faces carry the eye back towards the woman, while the pale water draws it sideways through the dark ground. The viewer repeatedly returns to the central meeting of her raised face and the dragon's descending head. ^{[1] [2]}

Who is the woman?

The biblical chapter gives her a description and a history, but no ordinary personal name. She bears a child destined to rule the nations, receives protection in the wilderness, and has other offspring who keep God's commandments and bear the testimony of Jesus. These relationships make her more than a solitary person caught in an extraordinary event. The narrative connects her survival with a continuing community. ^[2]

Christian interpretation has consequently read the figure on several levels. The Brooklyn Museum's account of its related picture connects her with Mary, Israel and the Church. The Honoring Mary student commentary likewise places the Washington image within traditions of interpreting the persecution and preservation of God's people, while acknowledging the woman's Marian associations. These are related interpretive traditions, rather than a single name that exhausts the figure's meaning. ^{[3] [15]}

For Blake's watercolour, that breadth is useful. The woman can bring the vulnerability of a mother into view while also carrying the larger experience of a threatened people. Her radiance and extraordinary wings place her beyond a naturalistic portrait. Yet her upturned face and extended hands give the encounter a human immediacy. The viewer need not choose between understanding the story and responding to the exposed body at its centre. Blake makes the scriptural figure accessible through gesture without reducing her to an everyday scene. ^{[1] [2]}

The dragon's identity is more explicit within Revelation. Verse 9 identifies the great dragon with the old serpent, the Devil and Satan. That identification belongs to the biblical source itself. It does not require the image to be decoded through an assumed fixed dictionary of Blake's private mythology. The woman's wings, the flood and the dragon's pursuit establish a specific scriptural encounter before any broader comparison with his poetry begins. ^[2]

Drawing, watercolour and the force of line

The Gallery describes the work as pen and grey ink with watercolour over graphite. Its listed overall dimensions are 40.8 × 33.7 centimetres, with a larger support measuring 55.2 × 44.2 centimetres. It is an intimate work on paper capable of sustaining a monumental conception. The figures feel enormous because of their relationship to one another and to the boundaries, rather than because the physical object is large. ^[1]

Drawing remains strongly visible in the effect. Lines carry the ridges of the dragon's wings and articulate the overlapping profiles beside his neck. The woman's dress depends on long, repeated curves that gather the fabric around her lower body. Colour gives those structures changing density: dark passages deepen the spaces between the wings, while warm yellows make the woman seem to advance into the light. The precision of a contour and the diffusion of a wash cooperate throughout the scene. ^[1]

That combination enables a particularly unsettling treatment of the dragon's flesh. Some passages appear solid and rounded, especially the shoulder, chest and extended limbs. Elsewhere, lighter colour allows the anatomy to become difficult to separate from the crowded heads and wings. The monster shifts between a persuasive body and an unstable assembly. Around the woman, the long drawn folds produce a different continuity, carrying the eye from the bright upper body to the support below. ^[1]

The combination of drawn line and painted colour organises a violent subject with extraordinary delicacy. Blake keeps an immense conflict within the reach of a close viewer. Small changes of line, colour and spacing determine whether a form seems to shelter, descend, curl or break apart. ^[1]

A biblical picture for Thomas Butts

The watercolour belongs to the group of biblical designs made for Thomas Butts. The editors of the William Blake Archive place most of the surviving New Testament watercolours around 1800–05. Their account includes eight designs based on Revelation within a wider biblical project. The four familiar dragon compositions therefore sit inside a larger imaginative engagement with the Bible, extending from events in Christ's life to visions of judgement and renewal. ^{[1] [4]}

Blake's letter to Butts of 22 November 1802 gives a contemporary view of the relationship that sustained this work. He addresses his patron as a friend who has enabled him to produce his pictures, while defending the artistic principles behind them. He describes two years of attention to light, shade and colour, and insists that the works sent to Butts unite intellectual and emotional commitment. His phrase “my Head & my Heart in Unison” makes that conviction unusually personal. ^[16]

The letter predates the Gallery's approximate date for this watercolour, so it cannot serve as a delivery note or a direct explanation of the dragon. It does reveal the seriousness Blake attached to the pictures made within this patronage. He discusses colour, design, artistic judgement and payment in the same communication. The visionary image grew within a working relationship in which a patron bought pictures and the artist argued for the value of his distinctive manner. ^[16]

That context helps the scale of the conception come into focus. A biblical watercolour could invite sustained, private looking while carrying the ambitions associated with grand historical painting. Here the drama depends on a handful of immense bodily forms, arranged with the clarity needed to command attention across the sheet. The delicacy of the material allows close examination, while the composition continually returns the viewer to the confrontation as a whole. ^{[1] [16]}

Four dragon pictures, different encounters

The similarly titled Brooklyn watercolour shows an earlier moment. Its dragon stands with his back towards the viewer, wings extended above the woman. The inscriptions connect it with Revelation 12:1–4, when the creature waits for the birth and intends to devour the child. The huge back obstructs the view and makes the woman's position below especially vulnerable. In Washington, Blake turns the dragon down towards us and gives the woman the wings described later in the chapter. The two works develop different encounters within the same narrative. ^{[2] [3]}

The comparison is most revealing when it moves beyond the change of viewpoint. Brooklyn's dragon presents a formidable standing body between the viewer and the woman. Washington's plunging creature shares the space with a figure whose own wings have become enormous. One arrangement concentrates attention on the monster's occupation of the scene; the other sets two winged bodies against each other. The later moment offers the woman a visible resource that changes the whole balance of the image. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

In The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea, also at the National Gallery of Art, a many-headed creature rises between the dragon's legs. Revelation 13:1–2 describes the beast emerging from the sea and receiving power and authority from the dragon. Blake makes that relationship visible through one body towering over another amid the waves. The principal encounter now concerns the transmission of destructive power, extending the story beyond the pursuit of the woman. ^{[2] [17]}

The Number of the Beast is 666, in the Rosenbach, continues this crowded world of wings, horns and multiple heads. Its title recalls the number given at the end of Revelation 13. The Block Museum included the work in its exhibition William Blake and the Age of Aquarius, identifying it as a pen-and-ink and watercolour design of about 1805. Read beside the two Washington pictures and the Brooklyn scene, it shows how concentrated Blake's attention became on this passage of scripture. ^{[2] [18]}

The differences between these works are part of their interest. Blake repeatedly rearranges the relation between a dominant body and the figures beneath it, discovering different kinds of fear, resistance and dependency within a small group of related designs. ^{[1] [2] [3] [17] [18]}

Vision made visible

Blake later distinguished imaginative vision from an allegory assembled out of borrowed signs. In his notes for A Vision of the Last Judgment, he treats biblical images as enduring realities of imagination. This is an argument about the nature of his art, expressed while discussing another work. Its emphasis on the reality of imaginative forms offers a useful context for the dragon watercolour. ^[19]

The distinction helps explain why a list of symbols can leave so much of the picture untouched. Knowing the dragon's biblical identity does not account for the angle of his head, the pale foot near his body, or the way the woman's fingers bend back into the light. Those particular forms make the encounter present. They give physical substance to pursuit and protection, allowing the viewer to feel their relationship before completing a verbal interpretation. ^{[1] [2] [19]}

The sheet has travelled far from the private collection for which it was made. The Gallery's provenance names the Butts, Robson and Newton collections before Lessing J. Rosenwald's gift in 1943. Its recorded exhibition history includes the Blake displays in Edinburgh, Nottingham and Manchester in 1914, and the Tate exhibition of 1978. The work now survives as a particular drawing with its own material and collecting history, as well as an image that belongs to a much larger biblical vision. ^[1]

Return finally to the narrow interval between the two faces. The dragon bears down with his many heads, enormous wings and twisting tail. The woman looks up with her arms extended, surrounded by a light that the dark forms have not extinguished. Her wings remain open. Blake leaves the encounter at the point where danger is fully present and escape has already become possible. ^{[1] [2]}