Job and his Daughters

Job lifts both arms into the air as three daughters gather around his chair. His long white beard falls over his chest, his hair spreads in agitated strands, and the broad sleeves of his garment open with the movement. Below him, a young woman kneels with a small open book; beside him, two others attend to his words. The scene brings a remembered ordeal into the intimacy of a family conversation. ^{[1] [2]}

William Blake’s watercolour Job and His Daughters belongs to the Morgan Library & Museum, accession 2001.82. It is the twentieth subject in the Butts set of Job illustrations. Although most of that set was made between 1805 and 1810, the Morgan identifies this sheet and number seventeen as additions made after 1821, when Blake borrowed the earlier drawings to copy them for John Linnell. This particular watercolour therefore belongs to the later development of the sequence. ^[1]

Blake returned to the subject in the twentieth engraving of his Illustrations of the Book of Job. That version moves the gathering indoors and changes the daughters’ activities. The two images share an expansive central gesture, but the outdoor watercolour makes a particularly absorbing picture of experience being received, recorded and passed on. ^{[2] [3]}

A family gathered in the open air

The watercolour’s setting is surprisingly pastoral. Job and his daughters occupy a sofa with rounded pink ends, placed on green ground beneath a blue sky. Sheep crowd in from both sides, their lowered heads forming a pale fringe around the seated figures. A dog curls up at the lower left; a small pale lamb rests towards the lower right. The animals’ stillness makes Job’s lifted arms seem still more energetic. ^[1]

His body holds the centre firmly. The white garment spreads down towards the grass, while his knees provide a framework for the daughter kneeling before him. The two seated daughters turn inward from opposite sides. Their inclined heads and the central figure’s lower position carry the eye back to their father, but each retains a distinct relationship to what she holds. The arrangement is balanced without becoming a row of identical listeners. ^{[1] [2]}

Above Job’s head, the sky becomes a field of pictured events. A broad cloud contains a swirling central apparition, with darker winged figures towards the sides. Penelope Minney identifies God in the whirlwind at the centre and bat-winged devils to either side. The threatening forms remain above the peaceful family and its animals, giving recollection a visible place within the renewed household. ^[2]

Job’s arms help connect these levels. His hands reach up towards the cloud, as though the story he tells requires the whole space above him. The daughters’ quieter movements answer this expansive delivery. Looking between their faces and his hands, we encounter the urgency of someone remembering and the concentration of those who receive the account. ^{[1] [2]}

Three named daughters and their inheritance

The immediate biblical starting point is unusually brief. Job 42 reports renewed wealth, seven sons and three daughters. It names the daughters Jemima, Kezia and Kerenhappuch, praises their beauty, and states that their father gave them an inheritance among their brothers. Blake develops those few verses into a scene centred on the daughters themselves. The brothers remain outside this particular gathering. Earlier, in chapter 29, Job had mournfully recalled the days when his children surrounded him and others waited silently for his counsel. Blake’s later gathering gives renewed company a specific form: these daughters attend with books and a scroll. ^[14]

The inheritance deserves attention alongside the praise of beauty. These women have a stated place in the distribution of Job’s possessions. In the watercolour, the books and scroll give the family gathering an additional dimension: the daughters also participate in the preservation of knowledge. That relationship between the scriptural bequest and the pictured reception of a story is a reading the composition invites; the Bible does not describe this conversation or tell us that the daughters wrote down their father’s words. ^{[14] [2]}

Nor does it assign a name to each position in Blake’s group. We can identify the three biblical daughters collectively without deciding that the blue-clad woman must be Jemima or that the kneeling woman must be Kezia. Their different activities distinguish them visually, while their individual names come from the text. Keeping those two forms of identification separate lets us look closely without inventing a key to the composition. ^[14]

The rest of chapter 42 complicates any easy account of reward. Before prosperity returns, Job acknowledges the limits of his understanding; God then rebukes the friends for failing to speak rightly and accepts Job’s prayer for them. Relatives arrive, eat with him and comfort him over his suffering. Renewed possessions occur within a wider recovery of relationships and speech. Blake’s attentive household gives that recovery an intimate form. ^[14]

The earlier children have died in chapter 1. The later seven sons and three daughters belong to the story after that catastrophe; the ending does not say that the dead have simply returned. The peaceful gathering therefore carries the memory of a broken household. The small scenes above Job make the coexistence of present security and remembered danger part of the image itself. ^{[14] [1]}

Books, scrolls and attentive work

At the left, the daughter in blue supports a broad pale surface angled towards the edge of the picture. Light marks appear upon it. Below, a larger closed volume leans against the sofa. The kneeling daughter holds a smaller open book close to her face. At the right, a long scroll hangs down beside the seated woman, its lower end curling near the ground. These objects introduce different shapes and scales into the otherwise flowing pattern of clothes and hair. ^{[1] [2]}

Minney reads the small book as a place where one daughter writes and the larger surface as a book in which another seems to draw. Her qualification matters: the image supports an association with recording, but the precise work being made is not legible. We cannot recover a passage from the notebook or identify the subject of a finished drawing. What we can follow is the combination of looking, listening and handling materials. ^[2]

The young woman at Job’s feet has turned partly towards us, making the book conspicuous. Her position also brings the act of receiving the story into the foreground. The daughter on the right looks upward towards her father while the scroll descends beside her. On the left, the broad page projects outward. Together they make a pattern of attention that moves between a speaker and things that may carry his words or images beyond the present moment. ^{[1] [2]}

This is a useful place to resist a rigid symbolic code. In her discussion of the Butts watercolours, Minney challenges the assumption that every bound book signifies oppressive law while every scroll signifies inspiration. Here the different forms coexist within a sympathetic family scene. Their presence encourages us to ask how knowledge is used and shared, rather than sorting every object into a fixed category of good or bad. ^[2]

That question is particularly apt for a picture made by an artist who combined words and images. The daughters’ materials offer several possible ways to carry experience forward. Their father’s body is animated by recollection; the things in their hands suggest the possibility of giving that recollection a durable form. The composition makes this exchange visible without requiring us to read any of their pages. ^{[1] [2]}

A story larger than the biblical verses

Another tradition helps explain why Blake could make so much of this brief family reference. Butlin’s Tate catalogue, following Bo Lindberg, connects the subject with the apocryphal Testament of Job. That work frames Job’s experiences as an account delivered to his children near the end of his life. Its opening summons them to gather around him and hear what happened. It offers a close narrative counterpart to Blake’s speaking patriarch. ^{[3] [15]}

The Testament also expands the daughters’ inheritance. They question their exclusion when goods are divided among the sons, and Job gives them celestial cords which transform their understanding and enable extraordinary praise. Near the end, the daughters have a privileged part in the music and vision surrounding his death. These episodes give them an active spiritual role beyond the biblical notice of their beauty. ^[15]

The connection helps us understand the scene’s imaginative scope, but it does not turn the watercolour into a literal illustration of every detail in that text. No explicit distribution of heavenly cords takes place here. The books, scroll and pictured memories form Blake’s own arrangement of a father communicating experience to his daughters. Minney’s reading of their activities draws together this larger tradition and the visible materials of the watercolour. ^{[2] [15]}

Job’s gesture also belongs to Blake’s wider language of bodies. Minney, reporting Lindberg, relates its outstretched arms to gestures used elsewhere for divine and spiritual power. Here that breadth belongs to an elderly human storyteller. His animated hair and lifted hands make recollection seem an experience of renewed energy, while his listeners remain close enough to turn that energy into a family exchange. ^[2]

The engraving brings the memories indoors

The engraved version changes the balance substantially. In Yale’s separately identified impression, B1978.43.1522, dated 1826 in its official image record, Job’s arms extend more nearly sideways. His daughters lean into the space beneath them. The two seated women incline their heads towards his chest, and the third kneels low at his feet. Their hands no longer display the watercolour’s recording materials. Touch and bodily closeness become more prominent. ^[16]

The setting has become an enclosed room. Three pictures behind Job organise what the watercolour had gathered in the cloud above him. The central scene contains God appearing in the whirlwind; on either side, oval pictures show violent events. Job’s hands reach across these side images, making him appear to guide his listeners through the representations. The room becomes a place where a life can be contemplated through pictures. ^{[16] [3]}

Tate identifies the left-hand scene as the destruction of Job’s servants by the Chaldeans, from Job 1:17. On the right is the attack on the ploughmen associated with verses 14–15, although Blake makes Satan the visible assailant where the biblical report names Sabeans. The distinction matters: the messenger reports separate disasters, while the pictures disclose a destructive agency above the human victims. These specific identifications belong to the engraved wall scenes. ^{[3] [14]}

The central whirlwind recalls God’s answer in chapter 38. Within the larger picture, that divine appearance is now something Job can point towards and his daughters can encounter through representation. The engraving holds devastation and revelation within the same room. Its close family grouping does not erase those scenes; it provides a setting in which they can be approached together. ^{[3] [14] [16]}

Words around the later image

The engraved page has another space for reflection outside the room. A vine climbs the side margins and extends across the top; grapes and curling tendrils accompany small winged figures. A lyre and a lute occupy the lower corners. These elements belong to the print’s designed border, which surrounds the darker central scene with a more open network of lines. ^[16]

Across the bottom Blake gives the biblical statement about the daughters’ beauty and inheritance. Above and below the picture, he adds passages from Psalm 139: the preciousness and abundance of God’s thoughts, and God’s presence in heaven and hell. The latter passage places the extremes of Job’s experience within an encompassing divine presence. It makes a particularly strong accompaniment to the recollections behind his spread arms. ^{[3] [14]}

The full psalm moves through being known, darkness and light, the formation of a person before birth, and a final appeal to be searched and guided. Blake’s selections concentrate that larger meditation around the family. They add words for an intimacy extending beyond human companionship, while the central group gives intimacy a bodily form through leaning heads and resting hands. Those printed verses are additions to the later engraving; they are not inscriptions on the Morgan watercolour. ^{[14] [16]}

The two collection objects also have different dates. Tate catalogues its engraving, A00031, as 1825, reprinted 1874; its historical series account distinguishes the engraved publication line from the suite’s issue in 1826. None of those dates describes the making of the Morgan sheet. The wider sequence and its publication history can be followed in the complete Book of Job series. ^[3]

Returning to the watercolour brings back the open sky, sheep and recording materials. Its colour also requires care: Minney disputed Blake’s responsibility for the colouring and reported Lindberg’s conjecture that Thomas Butts’s son had applied it. Her account leaves the identity of the colourist as a scholarly question; the visible blues and pinks cannot confidently be assigned to Blake’s own brush. The composition’s exchange is clearer than that uncertain finishing history: Job opens his arms towards his memories, and his daughters give those memories their attention. ^{[2] [1]}