Illustrations of the Book of Job

The musical instruments are there from the beginning. They hang in a tree above Job and his family, beautifully shaped and completely silent. Below them, the family kneels around an open book. By the last engraving, the instruments have come down into their hands. The figures stand, play and sing. Between these two gatherings, William Blake leads us through bereavement, bodily pain, accusation, nightmare and an encounter with the creation of the world. The change can be followed in something as tangible as a hand taking hold of a harp. ^{[1] [2]}

Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job consists of twenty-one numbered engravings and a title plate, published in 1826. Each main image has company: small figures, plants, flames, clouds and passages of biblical writing spread through its border. The words sometimes come from the episode pictured, sometimes from a much later chapter, sometimes from another biblical book altogether. They make the page a place where different voices meet. ^[1]

The series grew from watercolours made for two patrons, Thomas Butts and John Linnell. Its history therefore involves several kinds of object: an individual drawing, a repeated composition, an engraved copperplate and a sheet printed from that plate. Those differences become particularly rewarding when a watercolour’s concentrated scene acquires the engraved version’s expansive margins. Blake returns to his subject and gives the reader more to see around it. ^{[1] [3]}

The story Blake asks us to reconsider

The Book of Job begins by insisting on its central character’s integrity. Job is prosperous, has seven sons and three daughters, and fears that his children may have sinned during their celebrations. He repeatedly offers sacrifices on their behalf. In heaven, Satan challenges the disinterestedness of Job’s faith: would he still honour God if his household and possessions were taken away? Permission is given for the test. The reader knows about this exchange; Job does not. That unequal knowledge runs beneath everything the sufferer and his friends subsequently say. ^[4]

Disaster follows disaster. Animals and servants are lost, and a collapsing house kills Job’s children. A second heavenly encounter permits an attack on his body while protecting his life. Afflicted with boils, he sits among ashes and scrapes himself with a broken piece of pottery. His wife speaks in anguish; three friends arrive, scarcely recognise him and sit beside him in silence for seven days. Before they become accusers, they have come to mourn. ^[4]

Most of the biblical book is occupied by speech. Job curses the day of his birth. Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar offer increasingly hostile explanations of what has happened, defending a moral order in which suffering must somehow reveal wrongdoing. Job answers them with memories, questions, protests and appeals. His insistence on his integrity can coexist with terror before God and the desperate desire for someone to hear his case. The speeches cannot be reduced to one calm profession of patience. ^[4]

Their disagreement also concerns the evidence of ordinary life. In chapter 21, Job asks why the wicked can grow old in prosperity. In chapter 24, he describes people deprived of clothing, food and shelter while their oppressors remain powerful. The book allows these observations to disturb easy statements about divine reward. When a reader reaches Blake’s accusing friends, this long argument belongs behind their pointing hands. They are attempting to explain someone else’s pain through a system the sufferer has found inadequate. ^[4]

The younger Elihu then enters the debate, rebuking both Job and the three friends. Finally, God answers from a whirlwind. The answer ranges across the foundations of the earth, the stars, weather, animals and the formidable Behemoth and Leviathan. Job’s demand for a hearing opens into a vision of creation whose extent exceeds his experience. He acknowledges the difference between having heard about God and now seeing. ^[4]

The ending does more than restore possessions. God rebukes the three friends for speaking wrongly and instructs them to seek Job’s intercession. Job prays for them; relatives return, share food and give gifts. He has another family, and his daughters receive an inheritance among their brothers. These actions give Blake a rich succession of concluding subjects: judgement, prayer, receiving help, passing on experience and making music. The renewed household comes after a change in relationships as well as a change in fortune. ^{[4] [2]}

Two watercolour sets and a new commission

The Morgan Library & Museum dates the first group of Job watercolours to 1805–1810 and identifies Thomas Butts as its patron. Its exhibition account explains that this group originally comprised nineteen drawings. When Blake borrowed it in 1821 to make a second set for Linnell, two subjects, corresponding to numbers 17 and 20, were added. The familiar sequence of twenty-one therefore developed over time. Its completeness today can conceal that history of return and addition. ^[3]

One of the added subjects was Job and His Daughters, now Morgan accession 2001.82. It is a watercolour drawing, number 20 in the Butts series. The Morgan’s When the Morning Stars Sang Together, accession 2001.76, is the earlier set’s number 14, catalogued around 1805–1810 in pen and black ink and watercolour over graphite. These sheets have their own physical identities. They should be distinguished from the similarly titled engraved compositions, which Blake later surrounded with inscriptions and further imagery. ^{[5] [6]}

The second set also records a working relationship between the artists. Penelope Minney’s study describes Linnell’s pencil tracings beneath Blake’s ink and colour, while identifying several compositions made afresh. The process was more involved than commissioning a duplicate and placing it aside. Existing designs were being transferred, reconsidered and prepared for another kind of life. A tracing could preserve the arrangement that Blake wished to retain while leaving room for changes in treatment and detail. ^[7]

On 25 March 1823, Linnell and Blake entered into a formal engraving agreement. Tate’s catalogue gives the terms as £5 for each plate, or £100 for the proposed twenty-plate set, with a further £100 dependent on profits. The completed work expanded to twenty-one subjects and a title page. The date and original scope are useful reminders that a finished sequence may exceed the shape of the undertaking first written down. ^[1]

The business papers survive. Yale’s Beinecke Library lists the agreement, written by Linnell and signed by Blake, alongside accounts of payments, receipts and a record of subscribers and purchasers. The finding aid places these documents together in the William Blake Collection, GEN MSS 914. Their existence brings the series close to an actual exchange between working artists: money advanced, work delivered and buyers sought. Patronage supplied the circumstances in which this sustained act of invention could be completed. ^[8]

The engraved suite belongs to Blake’s final years, but the ideas and compositions behind it had already occupied him for decades. Its maturity includes that ability to return. A familiar arrangement can be given a different emphasis by a new gesture, a widened space or a sentence cut into a margin. The watercolours and engravings let us follow such decisions across objects, without assuming that the latest version cancels everything the earlier one achieved. ^{[1] [3] [7]}

What engraving makes possible

Joseph Viscomi explains the unusual character of the Job engravings through their making. Blake cut them with the burin, the steel tool used to push a line into copper, without first laying down the compositions by acid etching. Viscomi contrasts their expressive lines and textures with the conventional network of repeated tonal marks used in much reproductive engraving. The process gave each change of direction and pressure a direct role in constructing the image. ^[9]

The results are visible in small areas. In Job’s Evil Dreams, tightly packed lines deepen the space beneath the bed, while long strokes carry the hair and beard of the hovering figure across Job’s body. In When the Morning Stars Sang Together, the radiance, curling clouds, muscular figures and tiny scenes of creation ask the cut line to behave differently from one passage to the next. Darkness, movement and substance emerge through an accumulation of individual decisions. ^{[9] [10] [11]}

Engraving also brings writing and picture together on a single plate. This is a different process from the relief etching used for most of Blake’s illuminated books, but it serves a related interest in the whole designed page. A cloud can carry a sentence; a line of flame can bend around the words; lettering can change size to fit its place. Reading begins to move through the same spaces as looking. ^[9]

The title page announces that relationship in a comparatively open design. Hebrew lettering stands above the elaborate English title, while seven winged figures form a rising and falling curve beneath it. The letters have sharp terminals, swelling outlines and internal decoration. The small statement naming Blake as inventor and engraver identifies the work of conception and execution together. Tate records that this title plate was new to the engraved suite; neither watercolour set had its equivalent. ^[12]

That addition changes the entrance. The airborne movement precedes the seated family. The title prepares us for pages in which the space around a scene remains active, carrying forms and words that reward looking beyond the central rectangle. ^[12]

The family beneath the silent instruments

In Job and His Family, the first numbered engraving, nearly everything encourages a sense of order. The broad tree gathers the people under its canopy. Job and his wife occupy the centre; the younger figures form a gently curved gathering around them. Sheep rest in the foreground, tents appear in the distance and a church rises beyond the left side of the group. The family’s clasped hands and lowered bodies give the scene a shared stillness. ^[1]

The suspended instruments introduce another possibility. A harp, curved horns and a stringed instrument wait above the figures. Their shapes are fully available to the eye, but nobody reaches towards them. At the left, the sun lies low behind the landscape; the crescent moon occupies the darker sky on the right. The family appears settled within a world approaching night. Tate’s catalogue interprets these details as signs of the limits of Job’s original religious condition. ^[1]

The border gives that reading its sharpest support. On the altar below the scene, Blake places the contrast between the killing letter and the life-giving spirit, adapted from 2 Corinthians 3:6. Higher up, the familiar opening of the Lord’s Prayer crosses the clouds. Around the altar, words from Job establish the man’s uprightness and describe his children. Biblical praise of Job and a Pauline warning thus occupy the same page. Their placement requires the reader to consider how they bear upon one another. ^{[1] [4]}

This is also a place where versions matter. Minney challenges the assumption that the books in the earlier watercolours must themselves signify oppressive law. She observes that books and scrolls appear in positive settings elsewhere in the sequence, including the scene with Job’s daughters. Her argument concerns the Butts drawings in particular and warns against carrying the engraved margins backwards into every earlier image. The gentle family gathering can retain its human warmth even when the completed engraving encourages us to question what it understands. ^[7]

A useful first reading can therefore hold two things together: Job’s family is worthy of sympathy, and the series will bring its religious life into question. The Bible does not begin by revealing a secret crime that merits the destruction of this household. Blake’s additional words set up an exploration of spiritual understanding. They do not turn the initial catastrophe into a straightforward sentence pronounced upon guilty people. ^{[1] [4] [7]}

Heaven, catastrophe and the afflicted body

The second design, Satan Before the Throne of God, makes the reader’s unequal knowledge visible. Job’s household occupies the lower part of the picture while God sits above, holding an open book. Satan moves vigorously between these levels. The composition allows a single glance to connect domestic tranquillity with the heavenly encounter that threatens it. Job’s world and the cause of its coming destruction are present together, although the biblical Job has no access to the scene above him. ^{[13] [4]}

God resembles Job, with a long beard and a book resting across his knees. Satan, by contrast, has the powerful body of a young man. Tate draws attention to the likeness between Job and the enthroned figure and to the forms of Job and his wife appearing within Satan’s surrounding flames. Such repetitions make identity and appearance unsettled. The frightening power that enters the story will not always announce itself through a familiar monster’s body. ^[13]

The next engraving brings a violent change. In Job’s Sons and Daughters Overwhelmed by Satan, the destruction of the children’s house becomes a scene dominated by the tormentor’s bat-like wings. The biblical account describes a great wind and a falling building; Blake gives the disaster an embodied agent. His inscriptions join the report of the children’s deaths to the earlier permission granted in heaven. The page connects actions that the narrative conveys through successive speeches and messengers. ^{[14] [4]}

The intervening designs give these events a succession of encounters. The fourth brings the messengers with news of Job’s misfortunes; the fifth returns to Satan going forth from God’s presence. Within that fifth scene, Job gives alms, as Tate’s discussion of the later charity subject records. His ability to act for someone else survives into the period of his own affliction. ^{[15] [16]}

The sixth design moves the catastrophe into the body. Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils follows Job 2:7, but its upper inscription recalls Job’s response to the first disaster in chapter 1. Words spoken after the loss of possessions and children accompany the later attack on his flesh. Blake makes remembered endurance part of the bodily ordeal. The tormentor, sufferer and grieving wife form the central relationship that he also developed in a separate late tempera painting. ^[17]

That painted version has a stronger emphasis on Satan’s wings and the confrontation of bodies. The engraved design belongs to a page whose writing reaches back into the story. Looking between the two can clarify what the series format contributes: an image can draw several moments into its margins and ask us to keep them in mind simultaneously. The full treatment of Blake’s paintings follows these changes of material more closely. ^[17]

When comfort becomes accusation

Job’s Comforters preserves the friends’ first response to his condition. Its main inscription describes their weeping, torn mantles and dust cast towards heaven. Blake also brings in the New Testament’s remembrance of Job’s patience from James 5:11. The page allows the arrival to be seen within a much longer history of reading the sufferer as an example of endurance. The title’s familiar irony should not make us forget their initial act of grief. ^{[18] [4]}

The eighth and ninth subjects introduce Job’s despair and the vision of Eliphaz. The distinction between speakers matters. Job curses his day in chapter 3; in chapter 4, Eliphaz recounts a terrifying experience at night and the words he heard. That vision belongs to a friend’s argument, within the debate that the book will ultimately judge. Blake’s sequence asks us to encounter different claims to knowledge before the divine appearance. ^{[15] [4]}

The turn comes through the argument. By the tenth engraving, Job Rebuked by His Friends, the three men on the right thrust both arms towards him. Their repeated fingers gather into a barrage of accusation. Job kneels with his arms lowered and his palms open; his wife sits close beside him, one hand against her chest. The friends’ strongly directed gestures make an explanation feel like an assault. ^[19]

Blake condenses many chapters of debate into this arrangement. The main inscription comes from Job 12:4, where the upright man is mocked, but the other passages reach across chapters 13, 14, 19 and 23. Appeals for pity share the border with confidence in eventual vindication. These are different pressures within Job’s speech: he needs his friends’ compassion even while refusing their judgement. The engraving holds that complexity around a comparatively simple opposition of bodies. ^{[19] [4]}

Tate’s catalogue connects the composition with an earlier separate Job engraving and compares the friends’ repeated gestures with other works of art. It also reports Lindberg’s observation that the mocking of Job traditionally prefigured the mocking of Christ. This Christian context gives the suffering figure a further resonance. It leaves room for the immediate human force of the scene: three companions have ceased to listen to the person they came to comfort. ^[19]

The nightmare at the centre

The eleventh plate, Job’s Evil Dreams, changes the rhythm. After the friends’ accusing arms, a vast bearded figure stretches horizontally above Job’s bed. One hand points towards tablets above; the other reaches down towards flames. A serpent winds around the body, and the extended foot ends in a cloven hoof. Beneath the bed, figures rise from the darkness, carrying a chain and reaching towards the sleeper. The bedroom has become an enclosed field of terror. ^[10]

Job lies on his side, drawing his hands towards his head. The hovering figure’s streaming hair and beard press into the same narrow space as his face. Above and below are powers that leave him little room to move. Flames and long curling lines continue into the outer border, so that the nightmare seems to spread beyond the scene’s frame. The eye can follow this movement before it reads any of the writing. ^[10]

The main text refers to Job 7:13–15, where sleep offers no relief because dreams become frightening. Those verses do not describe the contents of the dreams. Blake creates the imagery and supplies its verbal setting from several other places. Above the picture, words from 2 Corinthians describe Satan appearing as an angel of light and his ministers as ministers of righteousness. The seeming authority of the bearded figure is therefore challenged by the page itself. ^{[10] [4]}

Butlin’s Tate catalogue interprets this as a crucial recognition: Job’s terrifying conception of God has taken the form of Satan. The tablets of law and the flames below become connected by the figure’s two arms. This is an attributed reading of a deliberately constructed image, supported by the serpent, hoof and Pauline inscription. It gives a precise reason why the dream occupies a turning point in Blake’s sequence. ^[10]

The position is itself revealing. The source passage comes from chapter 7, yet Blake places the nightmare after the image summarising the long dispute. The engravings pursue an order of experience that does not simply march through the Bible’s chapter numbers. Their surrounding words can return to earlier moments or anticipate later ones. Here, the distress voiced early in the biblical book becomes the visual culmination of the accusations and fears developed across the sequence. ^{[19] [10] [4]}

Even this page carries an opening towards hope. Beneath the bed, the writing includes Job’s conviction in chapter 19 that his redeemer lives and that he will see God for himself. The appeal for his words to be written and engraved also appears there. In a work cut into metal, that wish for enduring testimony has an especially tangible presence. Job’s imagined destruction and his desire to be heard remain together on the same sheet. ^{[10] [4]}

A larger world comes into view

The twelfth design introduces Elihu; the thirteenth gives God’s answer from the whirlwind. Their position follows the biblical movement from exhausting human debate to divine speech. It prepares the expansive vision in the fourteenth plate, When the Morning Stars Sang Together. Job, his wife and the friends remain below, but the upper part of the image opens into a chorus of uplifted arms. The shared act of looking now has something new before it. ^{[15] [4] [11]}

The engraved Morning Stars is arranged in distinct levels. Four youthful figures stretch their arms upwards at the top, with further arms cut by the edges of the picture. God sits beneath them with his arms extended across the width. Sun and moon imagery occupies the sides of this central region. Below, the human observers look up from an enclosure shaped by rock and cloud. The bounded experience of the people meets a vision that seems to continue beyond the visible frame. ^[11]

Blake’s words come from God’s question about laying the foundations of the earth in Job 38:4–7. In the Bible, the singing of the stars belongs to a time before Job’s existence. The engraving makes that inaccessible beginning available as an image. The spectators cannot claim to have witnessed creation, yet they can now be shown something of its grandeur. The scene gives visual substance to the difference between possessing an explanation and receiving a revelation. ^{[11] [4]}

Around it, six small compartments introduce another account of creation. Phrases from Genesis accompany light, the firmament, divided land and water, the heavenly lights and living creatures. The margins therefore place the Book of Job in conversation with the Bible’s opening chapter. Their small, comparatively open designs differ from the densely worked central scene. A reader can move from the tremendous bodies above Job to these compact acts of making at the sides. ^[11]

Tate reports Lindberg’s identifications of the sun and moon figures with Helios and Selene and his more elaborate proposal concerning Aaron’s breastplate. Those readings belong to the design’s interpretive history. A first encounter need not settle every identification. The visible relationship is already compelling: human bodies below, a commanding figure between, and an upper gathering whose lifted arms extend the picture’s reach. ^[11]

The watercolour of When the Morning Stars Sang Together at the Morgan offers a related scene with a different material presence. Its blue, pale radiance and colour contrasts carry the encounter without the engraving’s six surrounding Genesis compartments. Tate specifically notes the extra arms added at the edges of the engraved composition. A shared subject thus becomes a fresh arrangement of scale, continuity and surrounding scripture. ^{[6] [11]}

Beasts within the creation

Behemoth and Leviathan, the fifteenth engraving, gives the vision an unexpected centre of gravity. God points down towards two creatures enclosed in a rounded world. Behemoth stands heavily on land, its massive body and lowered head filling the upper part. Below it, Leviathan curves through water, its open jaws rising towards the right. Job and his companions peer down from above the enclosure, becoming witnesses to forms of life they cannot command. ^[20]

The scriptural sources occupy chapters 40 and 41. God asks Job to consider Behemoth and challenges his ability to capture or domesticate Leviathan. Blake makes their difference immediately legible through weight and movement: one creature plants its feet; the other coils and gapes. The round boundary gathers land and sea into a compact spectacle, while the divine pointing finger directs attention into it. ^{[20] [4]}

The creatures have attracted interpretations involving nature, material existence and the powers of war. Tate’s catalogue reports Lindberg’s more specific reading of their globe as hell and as a challenge to scientific cosmology. These are arguments about the image, not labels that the animals visibly carry. The immediate place of the plate in the series is clear enough: the revelation includes an immense and disturbing creation whose strength exceeds human control. Its strangeness belongs within the answer Job receives. ^[20]

The accuser falls

The sixteenth design, The Fall of Satan, returns to the vertical arrangement of the early heavenly scenes. God sits at the top with an open book; angels occupy the sides. At the centre, Satan plunges head down into a rift. Job and his wife remain to the left, while the friends recoil together on the right. The ground that once held their argument has opened between them. ^[21]

The Book of Job does not narrate Satan’s fall at this point. Blake builds the episode through a wider biblical gathering. The margins invoke Luke’s falling Satan, the casting down of the accuser in Revelation and the expulsion of the prince of this world in John. Job’s experience is placed within a Christian account of judgement and deliverance. This is one of the clearest moments in which the engraved sequence announces the breadth of Blake’s scriptural interpretation. ^[21]

The fall also changes the pattern of accusation. In the tenth plate, the friends had surrounded Job with their pointing hands; here the figure identified in the margins as the accuser is himself cast down. Judgement turns back upon the power that accuses. Butlin identifies the enthroned figure with Christ and the book upon his knees with the Book of Life. That reading ties the scene’s repeated heavenly arrangement to a changed understanding of divine judgement. ^{[19] [21]}

Receiving help and sharing experience

The seventeenth and eighteenth subjects move through the vision of God and Job’s sacrifice. In the biblical ending, Job is asked to pray for the friends who have spoken wrongly about God. His restored circumstances follow that act of intercession. Blake then pauses over the assistance brought by his returning circle. The movement from isolation into relationship takes place through successive acts, each requiring another person. ^{[15] [4]}

The nineteenth engraving, known at Tate as Every Man also Gave him a Piece of Money, illustrates Job 42:11. Its border brings together passages concerning poverty, wealth, divine provision and remembered need. Tate compares its morning landscape and ripe corn with the earlier scene in which Job received news of catastrophe. The act of receiving is repeated under changed circumstances. A messenger’s devastating report gives way to the tangible help of other people. ^[16]

The biblical gifts are modestly particular: each visitor brings a piece of money and a gold earring, and the returning group eats with Job in his house. Those details prevent restoration from becoming wholly abstract. The man who once possessed abundance has needed company, food and help. The nineteenth plate gives a distinct place to accepting them before the family’s final celebration. ^{[4] [16]}

In the twentieth engraving, Job and His Daughters, another form of giving takes over. Job sits among three young women, spreading his arms towards images on the walls behind him. Those pictures recall destruction and the divine appearance in the whirlwind. His history has become something that can be shown and told. The enclosed room contains both the listeners and the earlier scenes they are being invited to consider. ^[22]

This interior differs from the more open setting of the Morgan watercolour. In that drawing, Job’s daughters gather with books and a scroll as he extends his arms; behind them, a vision opens above the landscape. In the engraving, the remembered episodes are contained within the architecture. The difference changes our sense of how experience is being passed on: the surviving father becomes a guide to pictures that preserve his ordeal. ^{[5] [7] [22]}

The main engraved inscription concerns the daughters’ inheritance among their brothers, as recorded in Job 42:15. Tate also cites the apocryphal Testament of Job as a source for the father telling his daughters about his afflictions and salvation. The engraving therefore joins two kinds of legacy, possessions and understanding. It offers a quiet counterpart to the accusing friends: here, a group draws close to someone’s history in order to receive it. ^{[22] [4]}

The instruments come down from the tree

The last engraving returns us to the family gathering, but standing bodies and sounding instruments now animate it. Job holds a harp. His wife plays beside him; younger figures carry horns, pipes and other instruments. Their differing actions produce a shared activity without repeating one gesture. Sheep still rest at the front. The living creatures, tree and household give the conclusion a recognisable relation to the opening while allowing its whole rhythm to change. ^[2]

Tate identifies the sunrise as a counterpart to the first plate’s sunset and notes that the marginal designs reverse the opening arrangement. Words about Job’s later prosperity and long life surround the image. On the altar below, an adaptation of Hebrews 10:6 questions the pleasure God takes in burnt offerings for sin. Above, the praise corresponds to Revelation 15:3, where the song joins Moses and the Lamb. Blake’s conclusion is framed through more than one biblical testament. ^{[2] [4]}

The beginning and ending can now be compared through action. Earlier, the family bowed beneath instruments it did not touch; here, people make music together. Earlier, the altar’s writing opposed letter and spirit; now its writing speaks about sacrifice. The return asks us to look again at what the first gathering lacked. It gives spiritual renewal a bodily form in breath, lifted arms and fingers on strings. ^{[1] [2]}

There is nevertheless a scholarly reason to leave room for the first scene’s tenderness. Minney discusses early proofs, known through the auction material studied by Robert N. Essick, in which the first and last plates carried different inscriptions connecting prayer and praise with imaginative art. She reports Essick’s suggestion of a late change in conception, then argues for reconsidering the received condemnation of Job’s starting condition. Her disagreement makes the development of the engraved page part of the question. ^[7]

Those removed words should not be read as though they remained on the issued engraving. They do, however, remind us that the series’ apparent symmetry was worked upon. The final plates invite a movement from restricted understanding towards active spiritual life; their earlier forms can complicate how sharply that movement is drawn. Looking at the particular state and medium keeps an interpretation responsive to the work’s history. ^{[1] [7] [2]}

Publication, proofs and later impressions

The date on a Job engraving needs careful reading. Most plates carry a publication line dated 8 March 1825. Tate records that Blake and Linnell visited the printer J. Lahee to see proofs three days earlier, but places the finished engravings’ availability at the end of March 1826. The first design carries the anomalous year 1828, which the catalogue identifies as an error. An engraved imprint is one kind of evidence; it does not by itself establish when a particular sheet was printed. ^[1]

The word Proof can also mislead. Tate distinguishes working proofs, including impressions on which Blake tested border designs, from the 215 sets issued with that word engraved on the plates. These were followed by 100 sets without it. A sheet bearing Proof can therefore belong to an issued group offered to collectors, rather than preserving an unfinished stage of the design. The inscription has to be read alongside the catalogue’s account of its state and printing. ^[1]

The National Gallery of Victoria’s impression of the nineteenth plate offers a concrete example. Catalogued as engraving on chine collé, accession 1058.20-3, it retains the word Proof. The museum identifies it with the group of 150 sets on Whatman Turkey Mill paper within the first issue of 215. This is information about an identified sheet and the set to which it belongs. Another reproduction of the same scene may represent a different printing. ^[15]

Later impressions extend the story beyond Blake’s lifetime. Tate’s catalogue quotes John Linnell Junior’s 1892 account that the plates were put away after 1826 and used again in 1874 to print 100 sets on India paper. It identifies Tate’s own suite as apparently belonging to that later printing. The copperplates eventually entered the British Museum in 1919. A later impression can preserve Blake’s designed lines while belonging to a subsequent history of production and collecting. ^[1]

These distinctions help when comparing museum images. The subject number identifies a place in the sequence; the plate is the copper surface; the impression is the individual result of printing it. Its paper, printed state and provenance belong to that physical sheet. The Morgan watercolours, Melbourne’s issued proof impressions and Tate’s later impressions bring us into contact with different moments in the life of the same great project. ^{[1] [3] [15]}

Blake himself gave the series an unusually direct defence. In his letter to George Cumberland of 12 April 1827, he thanked him for helping with Job and insisted on the individuality of a line, straight or curved, even in its smallest divisions. His phrase “a Line is a Line” makes a useful companion to the engravings. Follow one through a cloud, a lock of hair, a moving hand or a written word, and the immense subject returns to the particular marks through which Blake made it visible. ^[23]