Paradise Lost Illustrations

Adam and Eve kiss on a bank so thick with flowers that it seems capable of supporting their weight. Above them, a winged figure turns towards a serpent coiled around his own body. His hand rests against its head, repeating the lovers’ caress below. In William Blake’s illustrations to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a gesture can belong to two different kinds of relationship. The loving couple look towards one another; Satan’s embrace closes around an image of himself. The viewer encounters the difference before reaching for an explanation. ^[1]

Blake returned to Paradise Lost in three watercolour projects, conventionally called the Thomas, Butts and Linnell sets after their patrons. Their dates are 1807, 1808 and 1822. These are related groups of drawings, with changes in scale, subject and treatment. They reward looking as sequences, because a body, a flower or a serpent encountered early in the story can acquire another meaning when it returns. ^[2]

The best way into them is to follow a few of those returns. Satan’s raised arms summon fallen angels; Sin reaches between threatening weapons; Eve’s hand moves from a human head to a serpent’s; Michael finally takes both human beings by the hand. Blake turns the epic’s immense distances into encounters between bodies. His pictures keep asking who reaches towards whom, what kind of attachment results, and whether an apparent movement towards freedom has become another form of captivity.

Three projects, with different histories

The first complete group consists of twelve drawings painted in 1807 for the Reverend Joseph Thomas. All twelve are now at the Huntington in California. Usually called the small set, these are upright sheets approximately twenty-five centimetres high. The collection’s accession sequence needs care: the Thomas drawings are 000.1, 000.2 and 000.4–000.13. The intervening 000.3 is a larger version of Satan, Sin and Death from the Butts group. Thirteen associated Huntington drawings therefore do not make a thirteen-subject Thomas series. ^[3][4]

The Butts set also contains twelve surviving designs. Thomas Butts acquired them in 1808 and probably commissioned them, as the William Blake Archive’s editors carefully phrase the relationship. Nine are at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Satan Calling Up His Legions is at the Victoria and Albert Museum; the large Satan, Sin and Death is at the Huntington; and The Judgment of Adam and Eve is at Harvard’s Houghton Library. The Boston group comprises subjects three to nine, eleven and twelve. Seeing only those nine sheets can make a complete series appear incomplete. ^[3][5]

The later drawings are roughly twice the height of the Thomas sheets. Their larger figures and more developed modelling change the encounter even when the arrangement remains familiar. Yet size is only part of the revision. Eleven subjects recur, while the Thomas design combining Satan’s spying with Raphael’s descent is replaced by Adam and Eve Asleep. The order also changes: the watching scene is fifth in the Thomas sequence and fourth in the Butts sequence, followed by the new sleeping scene. ^[5]

The third project began in 1822 for John Linnell. Its three securely catalogued sheets are divided between two museums. Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria holds Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve, accession 1025-3, and The Creation of Eve, accession 1024-3. Their current records date both to 1822. ^[6][7]

The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge holds The Archangel Michael Foretelling the Crucifixion, PD.49-1950. It describes the work as begun in 1822 and dates it no earlier than that year. Martin Butlin transcribes Linnell’s journal entry of 9 May 1822 recording that Blake began copies of his Paradise Lost drawings. The three known compositions follow the larger Butts designs. A projected repetition of the complete series is plausible, but three surviving finished sheets do not prove that twelve were completed and nine subsequently lost. ^[8][3]

A proposed fourth sheet complicates the census. In 2017 Butlin attributed a newly discovered Adam and Eve Asleep to Blake and placed it with the Linnell group. Robert N. Essick rejected that attribution, pointing to weaknesses in the outlines, handling and figures, as well as the absence of a documented Linnell provenance. Essick explicitly based his assessment on a digital image. The disagreement is a reason to distinguish three securely established works from a proposed addition. A confident total of four would conceal the central question of authorship. ^[3][9]

Nor does the date 1808 make every Butts sheet equally straightforward. The Huntington’s catalogue discusses the possibility that its large Satan, Sin and Death originated around 1806 as an independent work before joining the group. The Huntington’s works list dates the large sheet to 1808. The series name identifies the drawing’s eventual relationship to its companions; it need not settle every stage of its making. ^[10][4]

A route through Milton’s story

Milton’s poem begins after the war in heaven. Satan and his companions have already fallen when the reader first encounters them in Hell. His journey towards the newly created human world brings him to Sin and Death at the gates. In heaven, the Son offers to redeem humanity; in Eden, Satan watches Adam and Eve. Raphael’s later warning contains an account of the earlier heavenly war, while Adam tells the angel how Eve was created. The human fall comes after those conversations. Judgement, foreknowledge of redemption and departure from Eden follow. ^[11]

This order matters when looking at Blake’s drawings. The Rout of the Rebel Angels, although encountered well into the series, depicts events earlier than the opening image of Satan rallying his defeated followers. The Creation of Eve also reaches backwards into a remembered beginning. Twelve pictures do not function as twelve evenly spaced snapshots, one for each book. They move between present action, retrospective narration and a vision of the future.

Several kinds of voice operate inside that movement. Satan’s claim to independence is his own speech. Adam’s recollection of creation is an account given to Raphael. Michael’s description of the Crucifixion is a prophecy delivered to Adam. The narrator sometimes comments directly on what the characters say and do. Blake then makes further choices: he can place separated events in the same picture, invent a bodily relationship, or give a metaphor an almost literal form. Keeping those levels apart allows us to see how actively he reads.

Blake challenged Milton earlier, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Its discussion of energy and restraint leads to the assertion that Milton belonged to the “Devils party without knowing it”. The remark concerns the poet’s imaginative freedom when writing about Hell and his constraint when writing about divine authority. It occurs within a deliberately provocative account of opposed interpretations, including what the Devil’s account would say. It should be read within that argument before becoming a verdict on every later picture. ^[12]

The watercolours give Satan beauty, strength and attention, but also entanglement and envy. They give substantial space to the Son’s offer, judgement and foretold sacrifice. Those decisions make the series more searching than an illustrated declaration of allegiance to one side. A viewer can feel the attraction of Satan’s splendid body while watching the relationships around it expose the limits of his freedom.

Earlier pictures beside the series

Two related works offer useful approaches to the watercolours. Satan Calling His Legions belongs to an earlier history of independent tempera paintings. The National Trust dates the Petworth version to about 1800–1805 and identifies it as tempera and gold leaf on canvas. Its catalogue distinguishes that painting from an earlier version now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as from the later watercolour compositions. They share an episode, but belong to different undertakings. ^[13]

Blake’s 1809 Descriptive Catalogue describes the earlier exhibited painting as an experiment and as a composition preceding a more perfected picture made for a woman of high rank. He also complains that repeated labour had damaged its original outlines. These are his own reflections on a particular painting and its difficult development. They give the subject a history before the Thomas and Butts watercolours, without making either watercolour an exhibit from 1809. ^[14]

Satan Exulting over Eve offers another earlier encounter with the serpent and the human body. The Getty’s particular impression, 84.GC.49, is dated 1795 and combines a colour print with graphite, pen, ink and watercolour. Satan hovers above Eve while a serpent coils around her below. That separate design anticipates a relationship Blake would reconsider in the Paradise Lost scenes, but it is outside the later twelve-sheet sets. The collection and material description belong to the Getty object. ^[15]

The distinction also helps with titles. The Fall of Satan in Blake’s Job sequence is a different composition from The Rout of the Rebel Angels in the Milton drawings. A falling Satan alone cannot identify a literary source. Likewise, Blake’s own Milton: A Poem in Two Books is a separate literary and visual work. These neighbouring subjects extend the encounter with Milton and Christian imagery, while the watercolour sets remain a defined group of pictures. ^[16]

Satan calls: the body that seems able to rise

The Thomas series opens with Satan upright on a rock, both arms lifted above his shoulders. Around and below him, the fallen angels bend, crouch, rise or remain bound. A large shield rests behind him. At the bottom centre, a seated figure faces the viewer with knees drawn up and hands held low; nearby, another body hangs upside down. The leader’s commanding vertical stance is surrounded by positions in which the human form seems to have lost its ease. ^[17]

The picture makes an immediate impression of force, but the variety of responses is just as striking. Several figures raise their hands towards Satan; others turn away or support their heads. Their bodies have the same muscular promise as his. That common physical language makes their different conditions visible: strength can gather itself, sink into melancholy, or become a weight that cannot be lifted. The composition lets the summons and the difficulty of answering it occupy one sheet.

Milton gives the voice an unmistakable power. Satan calls to the defeated host, reminding them of their former rank and shaming their apparent willingness to remain prostrate. They respond like soldiers abruptly awakened on duty. Earlier in the book, however, the narrator has told the reader that Satan could rise only because heaven permitted it. The leader’s account of his recovered strength and the narrator’s explanation do not agree. His rhetoric attempts to turn defeat into a new occasion for command. ^[11]

Blake concentrates that tension in the central body. Satan looks capable of raising others because he stands so magnificently himself. Yet the arms beneath him repeat his gesture without immediately attaining his stability. The chain and bent knees in the foreground remain there for us to see. The picture can therefore sustain admiration for bodily energy alongside doubt about what its leader offers. Its interest lies in that simultaneous experience, before the viewer has reduced Satan to either a hero or a warning.

This opening also establishes a useful way of reading the sequence: attend to changes in the same kind of body. Angelic, human and threatening figures often share an idealised anatomy. Moral character does not always arrive as a distorted face or an obviously alien species. Posture, direction, company and action become essential. What someone does with strength matters more than the mere possession of it.

At Hell’s gates: a family unable to recognise itself

The next design brings the raised arm into a threatened collision. Satan advances from the left with shield and spear. Death confronts him from the right, raising a flaming weapon. Between them, Sin stretches both arms upwards. Her upper body is human, while serpents and snarling hounds gather below it. The crossing weapons direct attention to the space she occupies. Architecture makes the encounter feel blocked: arches behind Satan lead towards a heavy barred gate behind Death. ^[10]

Death is a particularly strange presence. His face, crown and muscles are clearly drawn, yet the gate remains visible through him. Blake gives an absence a discernible body. The effect is easier to recognise if the viewer first looks at the solid flesh of Satan and Sin, then returns to the figure on the right. The same drawn vocabulary can describe either substance or a shape through which something else appears.

Milton prepares exactly that difficulty. The narrator struggles to call Death a shape or a substance at all, describing something poised between shadow and form. Satan initially fails to recognise both figures at the gate. Sin interrupts the threatened combat and tells him their family history: she sprang from his head; he loved his own likeness in her; Death was their offspring. Her account continues into the violence Death inflicted on her and the recurring torment of the hounds. Recognition brings a history that Satan’s first confident challenge excludes. ^[11]

Sin’s extended arms consequently do more than divide two attackers. She is trying to stop father and son from destroying one another, while disclosing the relationships that connect them. Her position gives her an immediate compositional authority. She occupies the centre and interrupts the strongest diagonals. The viewer sees a figure whose suffering and knowledge complicate the encounter’s display of martial force.

The key hanging beside her is small enough to miss. Once noticed, it changes the balance of power. The combatants occupy more height, but Sin can open the gate through which Satan wants to pass. In the poem, he changes his manner after hearing her explanation and promises a new world where she and Death will find prey. What began as a duel ends in cooperation towards another catastrophe. The picture holds the crisis before that cooperation, when family connection appears as both a restraint on violence and the means by which violence will travel further. ^[11][10]

The Son’s offer: an early view of the ending

Between the gates and Eden, Christ Offers to Redeem Man opens another kind of encounter. The Son stands with his back towards us, his arms spreading before an enthroned Father whose face is hidden. Angels descend at either side, holding crowns. Below the curving cloud boundary, Satan hovers with shield and spear. The page lets us see two actions separated by a level of vision: his continuing journey and the offer that will overcome its consequences. ^[18]

In Book III, the Father foresees the human fall and asks who will undertake humanity’s redemption. Heaven falls silent. The Son then offers himself and speaks of death, resurrection and return. His speech sets giving up his present glory against Satan’s pursuit of dominion. The circumstances are different, but both figures are choosing what to do with power. ^[11]

The Huntington’s catalogue relates the Son’s gesture to the later Crucifixion. It also offers a scriptural explanation for the Father’s concealed face: Milton’s heavenly song describes divine glory made visible through the Son. Its label proposes a more critical possibility, finding weakness in the Father’s slumped appearance. These are distinct readings of a striking visual choice. The picture provides grounds for asking about the Father’s withdrawn position without supplying a written judgement from Blake. ^[18]

Whatever conclusion a viewer reaches, the sequence has already introduced its eventual answer to Sin and Death. Satan is still flying towards the human world, yet the Son’s open arms anticipate the body shown on the cross near the end. That advance view changes the suspense. The question becomes how the drawings will bring a promise made above into contact with the vulnerable bodies below.

Eden: two embraces and two ways of looking

In the Thomas Satan Spying on Adam and Eve and Raphael’s Descent into Paradise, the page divides into three pointed areas. Satan stands at the left, enclosed by his wings and serpent; the couple walk together at the right; Raphael descends between them within a cloud. Above him, a bearded figure extends arms and wings across the top. The central descent interrupts the possibility of an unobstructed movement from Satan towards his intended victims. ^[19]

The arrangement combines episodes from different parts of the poem. Satan’s first watching of the pair belongs to Book IV, while Raphael’s instructions and descent occur in Book V. The Huntington’s commentary identifies that combination. Blake gives the reader a relationship between danger and warning that cannot be photographed as a single passing instant. Separate times become neighbouring spaces, and the cloud’s shape lets us feel the intervention dividing them. ^[19]

The human beings continue their walk without looking towards either watcher or messenger. Their absorption has a tenderness of its own. Satan’s serpent, by contrast, rises above his head and returns along his body towards the ground. An enclosure that might at first resemble shelter also appears to bind him. The visual separation of the compartments makes their unequal knowledge palpable: the pair have company they cannot see.

The following Thomas picture, Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve, brings the human embrace closer. Adam supports Eve’s head, and her hand reaches towards his hair. Around them, flowers expand into a soft seat and an enclosing arch. Above, Satan touches the serpent’s head while pointing towards the couple. The Huntington interprets the contrast as mutual love set beside self-love. The image allows that difference to be followed through the repeated hands and turned faces. ^[1]

Milton surrounds the encounter with a more complicated texture than the kiss alone suggests. Eve recalls her first fascination with her reflected image and her subsequent meeting with Adam. The narrator then describes the couple’s kiss and Satan’s envy. Satan recognises their happiness as the thing he cannot share, before turning the prohibition on the tree into the basis of a plan. Looking becomes preparation for an attack. His seeming pity for the innocent pair earlier in the book is followed by the narrator’s exposure of his self-justifying argument. ^[11]

The Butts version reverses Satan’s direction. In the Thomas drawing his head is at the left; in the later sheet it is at the right. The sun and crescent also exchange sides. Below, the lovers remain closely joined, but Adam’s outer leg now stretches diagonally towards the lower right rather than bending upright. The revision alters the balance of the whole page: the upper horizontal body and the lower spreading legs make a larger, more expansive arrangement around the central kiss. ^[1][20]

The Archive’s discussion of Blake’s serpents draws attention to his inclusion of both Satan’s angelic body and his serpent form within a single design. That doubling is valuable for the viewer. We see an apparently beautiful figure and the creature associated with his later deception together. The serpent supplies a second face towards which Satan can turn. He is watching the couple, but is also occupied by a relationship that circles back upon himself. ^[20]

A new night scene for Butts

Replacing the composite spying picture with Adam and Eve Asleep changes the series’ emphasis. The Thomas design looks across a threatened world and the warning coming towards it. The Butts subject takes us into the couple’s most vulnerable hours. In the episode Blake selects, Ithuriel and Zephon find Satan in the form of a toad close to Eve’s ear. The intrusion reaches the imagination while the body rests. ^[5][11]

The surrounding text is important. Milton has just celebrated the pair’s married love and described them sleeping in an embrace. The night search then reveals the attempt to corrupt Eve’s dreams. At the beginning of Book V she recounts a dream of being led to the forbidden tree, tasting its fruit and flying upwards before her guide disappears. Adam comforts her by distinguishing an unwelcome thought in sleep from waking consent. The dream troubles them, but it has not itself made Eve guilty of the later act. ^[11]

That distinction gives the added subject a different kind of suspense. The reader knows that the danger can enter a place of intimacy without changing its outward appearance immediately. The lovers’ sleeping together and the intruder’s activity belong to the same episode. Blake’s substitution gives the series a scene of threatened inward life alongside its more spectacular battles and confrontations.

It also changes how the watching picture is approached. In the Butts sequence, the embrace is followed by sleep and the concealed assault. The movement runs from visible tenderness to an intervention its subjects cannot perceive. The later temptation can then be remembered against two earlier moments of access: Satan looking at the pair and Satan trying to influence Eve’s imagination. The revised sequence creates its own rhythm, even though most of its subjects have been retained.

Creation remembered, warning remembered

The Creation of Eve appears in all three projects, making it one of the few subjects that can be followed through Thomas, Butts and Linnell. The current NGV record explicitly connects its 1822 sheet with Book VIII, lines 452–477. These are lines spoken by Adam while recalling his beginning to Raphael. The story is being remembered within a conversation, and its account of vision is unusually precise. ^[3][7][11]

Adam describes falling asleep after speaking with his maker about the need for companionship. His bodily eyes close, but his inward sight remains open. He sees a rib taken from his side and fashioned into a living woman, whose presence changes his perception of everything around him. This follows a sustained discussion of the kind of fellowship he seeks. The creation answers a desire for someone capable of sharing understanding and delight. ^[11]

Reading the episode that way keeps its sleep from becoming an empty convention. Adam is both inactive in body and receptive to a vision. Later, when Eve sleeps during Michael’s account of the future, the poem explicitly recalls this earlier sleep. The series gives the reader reasons to remember who is awake, who sees, and who learns through another person’s subsequent account.

The earlier warning scene and The Rout of the Rebel Angels also belong to a conversation. Raphael tells Adam about the war so that past events may help him recognise present danger. In that account the Son drives the rebels from heaven, employing power while withholding total destruction. The resulting fall is the event whose aftermath opened Blake’s sequence. Returning to it from the middle turns the first image into something newly understood: Satan’s magnificent recovery follows a catastrophe that the human listener has now been taught to remember. ^[11]

The temptation: when the garland falls

The Thomas Temptation and Fall of Eve sets a tree between the two human figures. At the right, Eve bends towards the serpent’s mouth, accepting the fruit while its coils encircle her. At the left, Adam turns his face upwards, holding a garland between his raised hands. Behind them, lightning breaks across a dark sky. The tree joins the picture from top to bottom, yet divides the human relationship across its trunk. ^[21]

The sustained conversation in Book IX makes Eve’s act a process of persuasion. She first discusses working separately with Adam. The serpent then approaches with flattery, explains its supposed acquisition of speech, leads her to the tree and argues against the threatened consequences of eating. Eve considers those claims herself before reaching towards the fruit. Milton gives the temptation time, argument and several changes of confidence. ^[11]

Blake concentrates it in contact. The fruit passes at the meeting of mouths, and Eve’s hand cradles the serpent’s head. Remembering the lovers’ earlier gesture makes the new attachment disturbing. The serpent has entered the position previously occupied by Adam, while its body closes around Eve. The scene joins seduction to an enclosure she does not appear to resist. The resemblance is visible before it becomes an explanation of what the image means. ^[21]

Adam belongs to another moment. In the poem he waits for Eve and makes a garland for her hair; when he hears what she has done, the flowers fall from his slack hand. The Thomas drawing keeps the garland raised, while the Butts version places it on the ground. This small alteration changes our sense of how far his knowledge has advanced. The earlier picture suspends him within apprehension; the later one makes the abandoned token of welcome visible beneath him. ^[11][21]

The change is especially effective because the garland belongs to the world of care and growing things that surrounds the pair earlier. Adam has prepared a gift for the returning gardener. Its fall turns a light object into a sign of interrupted expectation. It also asks the viewer to move the eye from the dramatic meeting of Eve and serpent down towards the quieter evidence at Adam’s feet.

Milton distinguishes the two acts of eating. Eve believes the serpent’s account; Adam subsequently chooses to share her condition although he understands the prohibition. The narrator does not permit the entire disaster to rest upon Eve’s deception alone. Blake’s simultaneous scene leaves the reader looking towards that further choice, even while the serpent occupies the foreground. The separate page on The Temptation and Fall of Eve follows the image more closely; within the series, the earlier kiss and the later Crucifixion supply essential companions to it. ^[11]

Judgement and the return of Sin and Death

The following subject brings Christ between the ashamed pair. Adam bows with hands joined, while Eve covers her face. Above them, Sin and Death occupy another zone of the composition, sending harm downwards. The Huntington’s account identifies this as another joining of separate narrative episodes: the human judgement and the consequences of the opened passage from Hell. Figures first encountered as a terrible family at the gate have reached the human world. ^[22]

Book X gives the judge two responsibilities. The Son carries out the judgement while acting as humanity’s mediator and future redeemer. After pronouncing the consequences of disobedience, he clothes the pair. Milton places care within the account of punishment. Meanwhile, Sin and Death construct a passage connecting Hell with the world Satan has entered. The new relationship between regions becomes a route for suffering. ^[11]

Blake’s divided picture makes that coexistence visible. The close encounter below can be read against the wider forces above. Following the series, the viewer recognises Sin and Death before treating them as general emblems. Their earlier confrontation and threatened hunger remain part of what they now bring. Repetition gives them a history within the drawings, and the picture’s judgement of two individuals opens onto a much larger human consequence.

Michael’s prophecy: a different use of the outstretched body

In Michael Foretells the Crucifixion, the central vertical body is Christ upon the cross. Michael stands at the left and raises an open hand towards him; Adam stands at the right with his hands joined. Beneath the cross lie the defeated forms of Sin and Death. A serpent winds towards Christ’s feet. At the bottom of the Thomas sheet, Eve sleeps in a shallow depression edged with small plants. The page gathers figures whose relationships have changed radically since the opening scenes. ^[23]

Blake makes Michael’s account of the future visible. The Crucifixion has not occurred within the human chronology of the poem. At the start of Book XII, Adam’s failing sight prompts Michael to continue by spoken narration. The angel explains how the promised deliverer will overcome the effects of Satan’s work through obedience, love, death and resurrection. He specifically warns Adam against imagining merely a physical duel with the serpent. Blake nonetheless makes the promise bodily, placing the serpent’s head at the nail through Christ’s feet. A verbal account of victory becomes a charged point of contact. ^[11][23]

The defeated figures below are central to that transformation. At Hell’s gate, Death stood upright and threatened a blow towards Satan’s head. Here, threatening forms have collapsed under the cross. The viewer can compare the former reach of the weapon with the stillness of the bodies beneath Christ. The sequence gives the promise of deliverance a visible memory: these are powers already encountered, whose activity we have watched move into the human world.

Christ’s outstretched arms also recall the series’ many gestures of force and appeal. The resemblance does not make every raised arm equivalent. It allows us to ask what the position accomplishes in each context. Satan’s initial display gathers followers beneath him; Sin’s extension interrupts a family combat; the crucified body becomes the focus of Michael’s revelation. The same anatomy acquires another significance through action, company and place.

Eve’s sleep remains a difficult part of the scene. Michael’s instructions in Book XI have explicitly left her below while Adam ascends into foreknowledge. Blake includes her bodily presence but does not give her Adam’s view of the cross. The resulting imbalance should remain visible. The picture’s promise concerns humanity, while access to its explanation is distributed unequally. ^[11][23]

Milton subsequently gives Eve a dream of reassurance. When Adam returns, she is awake and speaks of the promised restoration through her offspring. That later speech prevents the sleeping figure from becoming her final condition in the narrative. Her knowledge arrives by another means. Reading far enough beyond the illustrated prophecy lets the viewer preserve both facts: the exclusion within this scene and the consolation that follows it. ^[11]

Leaving Eden together

The last Thomas design brings Michael to the centre between Adam and Eve. He holds one hand of each as they step forward. Both look back and upwards towards a tremendous curling form of flame. Four bearded guardians on horses occupy the upper corners, while a serpent and spiny plants inhabit the ground. The simple human movement through the lower part of the page takes place beneath an extraordinary sky. ^[24]

The contrast in scale is affecting. Adam and Eve cannot control the great turns of flame above them, but the angel’s arms establish an intelligible connection at their own bodily level. One figure leads; two figures follow. Their open hands and turned heads preserve the hesitation involved in leaving. The shared movement has none of the commanding isolation of Satan standing above his followers in the first design.

Milton makes departure both painful and possible. Michael takes the lingering pair by the hand and brings them down from the garden. They look back at the barrier, shed tears and then move onwards into a world where they must choose their place of rest. Earlier in the same concluding passage, Michael has taught Adam to join knowledge with deeds, patience and charity. Leaving the place of innocence is accompanied by an account of how to live beyond it. ^[11]

Blake gives that departure a landscape already marked by consequence. The serpent has returned to the ground, and the plants no longer resemble the rounded abundance supporting the lovers. Yet the hands at the centre remain joined. The image can carry grief without making separation the only thing it shows. After so many destructive or self-enclosing attachments, the final act of guidance brings the pair into a common movement.

Reading across the drawings

Following the narrative establishes who appears and what happens. Looking backwards then exposes connections that a first passage can miss. Sin and Death beneath the cross recall the confrontation at Hell’s gate. Eve’s hand against the serpent recalls the earlier human embrace. The drawings reward a reader who remembers gestures as closely as events.

The different sets add another dimension to that looking. The Thomas drawings offer a complete, comparatively intimate sequence in one collection. The dispersed Butts sheets invite comparison with a larger and revised treatment. The Linnell works preserve a later return to selected compositions, whose incompleteness as a series leaves their intended extent uncertain. Each group has its own history; the familiar titles do not erase the individual sheets.

Institutional attention continues to bring that sustained encounter into view. The Morgan Library & Museum has announced William Blake: Paradise Lost for 26 February–23 May 2027, placing the watercolours within Blake’s wider engagement with Milton. Its published announcement uses the Boston Temptation and Fall of Eve, 90.99, dated 1808, to introduce the project. The exhibition is a future occasion to see these relationships brought together; the drawings already available offer ample reasons to begin looking. ^[25]

A serpent can appear as an intimate companion, an enclosing force or a defeated enemy. Sleep can shelter, expose or prepare the mind for another kind of understanding. Blake gives those changes concrete forms and lets the sequence gather their meaning. Reading beside the pictures makes the changes slower, clearer and more unsettling.