Nebuchadnezzar

A man has come down to the level of the earth. His knees press into the ground, his hands carry the weight of his upper body, and long nails extend from fingers that have begun to resemble claws. Yet William Blake gives him a face that remains painfully human. The eyes widen, the mouth hangs open, and the beard pours towards the surface beneath him. The body stretches across the picture while the head turns towards us, exposing a distress that the powerful frame cannot overcome. ^[1]

Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar represents the Babylonian king’s humiliation in the fourth chapter of Daniel. It belongs to his twelve large colour-print designs, conceived in 1795 and developed through printing, drawing and painting. The impression at Tate carries the date 1795 beside Blake’s initials, but its paper bears an 1804 watermark. Tate accordingly catalogues the work as 1795–c.1805. The image has a biblical history, a history within Blake’s own books, and a material life that continued after its first invention. ^[1][2][3][4]

The body that can no longer stand

The broad back initially suggests strength. Its long curve runs from the shoulders towards the haunches, giving the figure a substantial presence against the dark surroundings. Below it, however, the limbs have lost the relationships that make an upright human stance possible. One lower leg reaches backwards along the ground; the other folds beneath the body. The forearms descend almost vertically, transferring the burden of the chest into the hands. Blake makes the change of posture feel laborious. ^[1]

Follow the hands towards the lower edge. Their spread fingers and elongated nails bring the figure close to an animal’s way of meeting the ground. The toes repeat that distortion at the left. These small extremities determine how we understand the whole anatomy: a muscular man has acquired points of contact suited to crawling. His size and strength do not restore his former bearing. They make the struggle of moving within this condition more palpable. ^[1]

Hair carries the transformation across the body. Dark growth spreads over the haunches and legs, while the beard descends in long, emphatic strands. The hair at the crown sweeps into the bowed contour of the back. Colour joins flesh and covering through browns, golds, greys and greenish shadows. Parts of the body remain clearly modelled as human muscle; elsewhere, the surface becomes rougher and harder to distinguish from the surrounding earth and roots. The figure seems to be losing the boundaries that once separated him from his environment. ^[1]

The face resists that disappearance. The brows, open eyes and parted lips remain individually legible within the mass of hair. Their expression can suggest alarm, bewilderment or fear, while the turned head creates a sudden interruption in the body’s horizontal movement. We encounter someone looking out from a condition that has transformed his outward form. Blake makes the viewer attend to that remaining human presence. ^[1]

The king’s dream and Daniel’s warning

The biblical chapter begins after the events it will recount. Nebuchadnezzar addresses the peoples and languages of the earth, praising the power of the God who has acted upon him. He then describes his former security in his palace and the dream that disturbed it. The account therefore comes from a ruler who has survived his abasement and can look back upon it. Blake isolates the interval in which that recovery is still unavailable to the eye. ^[3]

In the dream, an immense tree reaches towards heaven. Its foliage, fruit and shelter sustain birds, animals and human beings. A heavenly watcher commands it to be cut down, scattering the creatures that depended on it. The stump and roots are to remain, bound with iron and brass, while a human heart is exchanged for a beast’s. The image moves from a flourishing world towards deprivation without wholly erasing the possibility of renewed life. ^[3]

Daniel identifies the tree with the king. His dominion has grown enormously, but he will be driven from human society and made to live among the beasts, eating grass like oxen. This condition will endure until he recognises a sovereignty beyond his own. The surviving stump gives Daniel grounds to promise that the kingdom will be restored. Punishment and the possibility of return are already present together in the interpretation. ^[3]

Daniel also offers practical counsel. He urges the king to abandon wrongdoing and show mercy to the poor. The warning gives the chapter an ethical reach beyond the ruler’s private thoughts about himself. Greatness is tested through the use of power and the treatment of others. When Nebuchadnezzar later praises Babylon as the achievement of his own might and majesty, his boast arrives after an opportunity to change. The heavenly sentence interrupts him while he is still speaking. ^[3]

The account of the transformation is brief and bodily. Driven away, he eats grass and is exposed to the dew; his hair grows like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws. Blake enlarges those details into a complete figure. The nails, abundant hair and lowered posture turn a few lines of narrative into a sustained encounter with an altered human body. The image makes the loss of a king’s social and physical elevation immediately visible. ^[1][3]

At the chapter’s close, Nebuchadnezzar lifts his eyes towards heaven. His understanding returns, followed by his counsellors, honour and authority. The restored king ends by praising the power that can humble the proud. That upward movement gives the crouching figure another dimension. Blake’s picture holds us close to the earth, while the source text preserves a future in which the gaze and the person can rise. The print’s disturbance becomes sharper when that possibility is remembered. ^[1][3]

Roots, enclosure and the loss of royal scale

Behind the king, great slanting forms fill the upper field. Their surfaces are streaked and knotted, with darkness gathered in the intervals between them. Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue describes them as massive twisted roots and suggests a relation to the stump and roots of the dream. The comparison is persuasive because the setting and the body share a vocabulary of growth, bending and confinement. ^[1][2]

The tree in Daniel first reaches towards heaven and shelters the world beneath it. Here, the forms associated with it have become an oppressive shelter around one diminished ruler. They give the figure little open space into which he might extend. A broad, sloping mass descends towards his head, while darker forms close the scene at the left. The once expansive claim of kingship has become an intensely restricted bodily world. The arrangement intensifies the chapter’s contrast between flourishing dominion and exposure. ^[1][3]

Small patches of green and blue interrupt the brown-gold enclosure. The ground has a broken, granular appearance, while a thin spray of foliage occupies the upper right. These passages keep the setting alive even as it presses closely around the figure. The environment is not a neutral stage for a moral emblem. Its textures compete with the king’s roughened body, making his altered relation to the natural world something we can follow across the surface. ^[1]

There is also a reversal of scale. The man remains large within the picture, yet the great forms behind him dwarf his capacity to act. He has none of the architectural, military or ceremonial signs through which a ruler might announce command. Hair, knees, fingers and earth have taken their place. Blake measures his fall through what the body has to do now. ^[1][3]

Earlier images of a lowered human figure

Butlin identifies Dürer’s The Penance of Saint John Chrysostom as a probable source for the pose. In that engraving, dated about 1496 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the crouching penitent is a small figure in the left background, behind a woman and child who dominate the foreground. His body is lowered to all fours within an extensive landscape. The comparison shows how a relatively minor element in one composition could become the central event of another. It remains a proposed source, rather than documentary proof of a particular act of borrowing. ^[2][17]

A second comparison brings the subject closer. The Met owns Robert Blyth’s 1782 etching after John Hamilton Mortimer, Nebuchadnezzar Recovering His Reason. Its king is rising, his head turned towards the light that enters from above. One hand presses to his chest while the other reaches across the rock beside him. The bodily change is already in motion: the lifted face and unfolding posture give recovery a direction. ^[18]

Tate’s catalogue discusses Mortimer’s influence through Geoffrey Grigson’s earlier study. Looking at the Blyth print beside Blake makes the difference especially telling. Both figures retain the hair, exposed limbs and disturbed appearance associated with the story, but Blake keeps the hands down and the back extended. The recovering man of the comparison becomes a figure still caught in abasement. Blake makes the lowered body sustain the whole encounter. ^[1][2][18]

The crouching king in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Blake had already used a smaller version of the composition on plate 24 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which Tate dates about 1790–93. Its place in the book gives the later image another context. The page closes a memorable fancy in which a Devil and an Angel dispute the nature of divine worship and moral law. Their exchange culminates in the Devil’s claim that Jesus acted from impulse rather than rules. The Angel embraces the flame and is transformed. ^[2][5]

Beneath the scene comes Blake’s sentence:

One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression. ^[5]

The statement makes differences between living beings central to the problem of law. A rule imposed without regard to those differences can become a means of injury. Butlin reads the crouching Nebuchadnezzar in relation to a human being subjected to the condition of a beast. The later independent colour print removes the surrounding argument, but the earlier conjunction of figure and words remains a useful way into its tension. ^[2][5]

That connection complicates a purely punitive reading. Daniel’s king is humbled for pride and restored when he acknowledges divine authority. Blake’s earlier book asks how moral systems recognise or suppress the particular life before them. The two contexts need not be forced into one conclusion. Together they make us consider the relation between a judgement and the suffering body through which it is carried out. The figure can embody a ruler’s fall while also awakening concern for a human being reduced to this condition. ^[1][3][5]

The following Song of Liberty turns towards the overthrow of a king and the breaking of stony law. Butlin also reports Albert Boime’s observation that the small book illustration wears a crown which the colour-print design omits. This is a specific difference between versions. It opens a possible political reading of the earlier image, while the uncrowned figure allows the independent work to address human degradation more broadly. Boime’s interpretation remains mediated through the Tate catalogue. ^[2][5]

Colour printed, then brought into focus by hand

Tate describes its Nebuchadnezzar as colour print, ink and watercolour on paper. The current record distinguishes the image, 44.5 × 61.9 centimetres, from its larger paper support, 54.3 × 72.5 centimetres. These dimensions give the crouching body considerable breadth while preserving the intimate viewing associated with a work on paper. ^[1]

Joseph Viscomi’s study of Blake’s large colour prints reconstructs a process in which painted colour was transferred from a prepared matrix and the resulting sheet was developed with drawing and watercolour. Most of the designs, including Nebuchadnezzar in his account, were printed from gessoed millboard. He calls the results monoprints: the underlying design could recur, while the paint applied for printing and the work performed afterwards made each impression individual. ^[4]

The distinction helps explain the image’s surface. The broad ground and the forms behind the body contain broken passages of colour; the face, strands of beard and elongated nails depend on more definite marks. The picture alternates between textures that invite the eye to wander and contours that hold it to a precise feature. Printing and handwork participate in the same expressive effect. The rough setting and the sharply legible face make the figure seem both embedded in the material world and startlingly present within it. ^[1][4]

In Viscomi’s reconstruction, successive pulls from a painted matrix carry different amounts of colour. A later pull may require more work by hand, while repainting the matrix permits a new printing session. The survival of several impressions therefore allows scholars to ask questions about sequence, paint and finishing that a single reproduction cannot answer by itself. A repeated composition can be the starting point for materially distinct works. ^[4]

Why 1795 and 1805 both matter

The Tate sheet is signed with the date 1795 and Blake’s monogram, but the watermark reads J WHATMAN / 1804. The paper supplies a firm limit: this impression could not have been printed in 1795. Butlin connects it with Blake’s account for Thomas Butts dated 3 March 1806, apparently recording delivery on 7 September 1805. The design date, paper date and likely delivery describe successive parts of the work’s history. ^[2]

The other surviving impressions have prompted different reconstructions. Butlin’s 1990 catalogue proposed that the three known versions, at Tate, Minneapolis and Boston, were all printed after 1804. Viscomi’s 2017 study separates them: he places the Boston impression in a proposed 1795 printing, and Tate’s and Minneapolis’s in a later session about 1805. In that reconstruction, Tate’s is the first pull and Minneapolis’s the second. The later argument changes the sequence of the group without undoing the watermark evidence for Tate’s sheet. ^[2][4]

Viscomi also offers an explanation for the inscribed year. He suggests that Blake was treating the prepared matrix as the primary object to be dated, following a printmaker’s convention. Printing a new impression from an older design would then preserve the earlier date. This is more specific than the notion that Blake was simply careless about chronology. It recognises that a date can refer to a different part of a composite process. ^[4]

A fourth impression remains uncertain. Butlin discusses an untraced version associated with Arthur Burgess, while Viscomi includes a possible lost pull in his reconstructed sequence. The proposed missing sheet remains distinct from the three works available for comparison. ^[2][4]

Reason, vulnerability and the comparison with Newton

The Tate catalogue brings two influential interpretations into conversation. Through David Erdman, Nebuchadnezzar becomes an image of reason losing its own command, related to Blake’s figure Urizen. Anthony Blunt’s account instead emphasises a person confined to sensory existence, set beside Newton as a figure confined by reason. Their different readings leave the proposed relationship between the designs open to discussion. ^[2]

The visual comparison is especially useful at the level of posture. Newton bends towards a diagram, directing considerable bodily strength into a small act of measurement. Nebuchadnezzar’s hands have become supports, and his eyes look out from a body whose movement seems painfully restricted. One figure concentrates; the other confronts a condition. Both occupy spaces in which human capacities have become narrowed. Their bodily grandeur makes that narrowing difficult to dismiss. ^[1][2]

Daniel’s conclusion keeps the question of reason open. The restored king explicitly says that his understanding and reason returned. The biblical story therefore values the capacity whose temporary loss the image makes disturbing. Blake’s connections with the law-testing satire of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell add another question: what form of life should judgement allow? The force of the picture grows from these pressures together, rather than from treating reason itself as a simple enemy. ^[3][5]

The impression’s later life

The design also attracted John Varley, the artist and astrologer associated with Blake’s visionary heads. Tate’s 2011 caption records his plan to include an engraving of Nebuchadnezzar in the prospectus for his book. The engraving was never completed. The proposed illustration places the image within a later interest in the transformation of human and animal form, while remaining an unrealised project. ^[1]

Tate’s work descended through the Butts family before the widow of Captain F. J. Butts sold it through Carfax to W. Graham Robertson in April 1906. Robertson presented it to Tate in 1939. The particular sheet has thus passed from the private relationship between artist and patron into a collection where its paper, colouring and inscriptions can be considered beside the wider group of large prints. ^[1][2]

Return to the face after following that history. The crown has gone, the hands press against the earth, and the immense body remains lowered. Yet the open eyes continue to meet a world beyond that posture. The source story gives the king a future; Blake gives this interval of exposure an extraordinary duration. His image holds the fallen ruler close enough for the viewer to register both the loss of power and the surviving person. ^[1][3]