Pity

The smallest body in William Blake’s Pity occupies the picture’s most urgent interval. A naked infant rises towards a figure leaning from a white horse, while below them a woman lies on the ground with her hands clasped. The child’s arms open; the rider’s hands descend. Around this meeting, hair, cloth and horses stretch across the darkness as though caught in one immense current. Blake gives this moment of approach the stillness and clarity needed for prolonged looking. ^[1]

The composition takes its imagery from Macbeth. Shakespeare imagines pity as a newborn child riding the wind, or as heavenly beings mounted on the air’s invisible messengers. Blake brings those alternatives together and adds the reclining woman, creating a scene that Shakespeare never places on stage. The impression at Tate, dated about 1795, combines colour printing with ink and watercolour. Its extraordinary effect grows from both kinds of transformation: words acquire bodies, and printed colour becomes an individually worked surface. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

The meeting of hands

The nearer rider bends deeply over the horse’s neck. Her pale garment gathers across her torso, while her long hair streams upwards and backwards. One arm reaches down beside the child; the other hand comes close to its body. The infant’s small limbs open into the space between her hands. The contact is delicate and difficult to turn into a single, certain action. It can suggest lifting, receiving or reaching towards a life that needs support. Blake concentrates the uncertainty at the centre of the picture, where the pale bodies stand out against the dark air. ^[1]

The woman below provides another kind of bodily presence. She extends almost horizontally across the foreground, her head resting towards the left and her feet towards the right. Her hair spreads over the ground; a long, light garment narrows around her legs. The clasped hands rest above her chest, lifting a small vertical shape from the otherwise low, extended body. Tate’s recent caption describes them as prayerful and offers more than one possibility for her identity: she may be the child’s mother, or a person affected by pity. ^[1]

Her face is turned upwards, but her body makes no movement towards the child. That separation gives the airborne encounter its emotional weight. The infant seems capable of a freedom of movement unavailable to the figure on the ground. Yet the two remain close enough for the eye to relate them immediately. Blake has placed the child just above the woman’s upper body, joining them through proximity while keeping a strip of darkness between the earthly and aerial groups. ^[1]

The ground itself looks uneven and exposed. Patches of green and yellow pass into darker, rougher areas, with little suggestion of a comfortable place to rest. The woman’s light flesh and clothing make her conspicuous against it. She appears vulnerable within the landscape before any particular story is attached to her. Above, the rider’s bending body answers that vulnerability through a movement of attention. One figure lies extended; another reaches down. The child brings those differing postures into relation. ^[1]

Horses carried by the air

The two white horses establish a second rhythm. Their bodies and outstretched legs carry the composition horizontally, while the nearer rider and infant interrupt that sweep with a descending and rising exchange. The horses’ heads cluster towards the right, their pale outlines pressed against the dark background. Their long tails extend towards the left, repeating the movement of the rider’s hair and the flowing cloth. Their suspension makes ordinary weight seem to have been lifted from these recognisable animals. ^[1]

Behind the nearer rider, another figure extends both arms across the upper part of the image. The face is less immediately available, partly concealed by the forward movement of hair and bodies. The open arms prolong the horizontal direction even as the foreground encounter draws attention downwards. Blake gives the two riders different tasks within the arrangement: one expands through the air, while the other concentrates on the infant. Their relationship can be seen before their possible names or meanings are considered. ^[1]

The darkness is equally active. Its broad curves echo the horses’ movement, and thin diagonal marks fall through the space at the right. Martin Butlin’s catalogue connects these marks with the tears in Shakespeare’s speech, transformed into rain. The atmosphere consequently participates in the emotion of the scene. Movement passes through animals, bodies, fabric and weather, while the reclining woman remains almost entirely horizontal and still. ^{[1] [2]}

Pale colour prevents the airborne group from disappearing into that surrounding force. The horses are not uniformly white: blue-grey shadows, warm touches and irregular marks give their bodies texture. The rider’s face and arms have a warmer delicacy, and the infant becomes a small concentration of flesh between the larger pale forms. Blake makes the supernatural encounter accessible through the particular weight of a hand, the angle of a cheek and the fragile extension of a leg. ^[1]

Macbeth imagines the consequences

In Act 1, scene 7, Macbeth considers murdering Duncan, his king and guest. His first wish is to contain the consequences: if the killing could bring success without anything returning upon him, he might accept the risk. His thought immediately defeats that hope. Violence teaches lessons that return to harm the person who first practised them. Duncan is also under his protection as a relative, sovereign and visitor. Macbeth should close the door against a murderer, not carry the weapon himself. ^[3]

The speech then turns from those obligations towards the force of Duncan’s goodness. His virtues will plead against the murder, and pity will carry its horror into public awareness:

And pity, like a naked newborn babe Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind. ^[3]

The passage is Act 1, scene 7, lines 21–25 in the Folger edition. Its images make an apparently vulnerable feeling into an immense power. A newborn child rides a storm; heavenly riders spread knowledge of the crime; tears overcome the wind. Pity becomes something the would-be murderer cannot shut inside the room where the killing occurs. It will move beyond him, making others see and respond. ^[3]

The rest of the scene gives that imaginative resistance a troubling outcome. Macbeth initially tells his wife that they will abandon the plan. She challenges his courage and invokes her own experience of nursing a child, imagining an act of violence against it as proof of what she would do to keep a promise. The tenderness and vulnerability associated with infancy return in a brutal form. By the close, Macbeth has accepted the murder scheme. His ability to picture pity does not ensure that he will act upon it. ^[3]

That dramatic context gives Blake’s image a sharper moral setting. The airborne infant originates in the language of a man who recognises the wrong he is preparing to commit. Its smallness belongs to an argument against destructive ambition. Blake removes the speakers and the castle, allowing the imagined power to occupy the whole scene. We encounter the bodies through which Macbeth thinks, rather than a portrait of Macbeth thinking. ^{[1] [3]}

Making two comparisons into one encounter

Shakespeare’s wording offers alternatives: pity is like the infant, or like the mounted heavenly beings. Blake gives them a common space. The child can meet the riders, and the wind that carries one can carry the others. The poem’s succession of comparisons becomes a relationship between figures. This is why the picture feels like an event even though its origin is a passage of figurative language. The horses, reaching hands and reclining woman supply the connections needed for a visible encounter. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

The added woman makes the change especially substantial. Shakespeare’s speech does not describe a mother lying beneath the heavenly riders. In Blake’s composition she gives the infant a possible earthly relation and gives pity someone towards whom it may be directed. Her clasped hands bring an appeal into the picture without identifying a particular crime or explaining her condition. The viewer must attend to her exposed body before deciding how the action above it should be understood. ^{[1] [3]}

The position of the infant sustains more than one feeling. Its upward movement can seem hopeful, especially beside the rider’s careful downward attention. The distance from the woman can also make the encounter painful. If the child is being lifted, the movement joins one pair of figures while separating another. Blake gives compassion a bodily complexity that a simple emblem could not contain. The hands promise contact; the dark interval reminds us of what contact has yet to overcome. ^[1]

The difficulty within pity

Blake’s own poetry gives reasons to keep that complexity open. In The First Book of Urizen, Los weeps over the chained Urizen, and pity begins through an anguished division. The poem states, “For pity divides the soul”. A trembling female form subsequently emerges, and the eternal beings call her Pity before fleeing. The appearance of a new being involves suffering, separation and fear as well as feeling for another. The passage supplies a troubling context for the word that names this image. ^[15]

Butlin’s catalogue explains that interpretations of the print have often emphasised such negative associations. It also summarises Christopher Heppner’s different argument: the picture offers the possibility of rescue through pity within a damaged world. The two approaches focus attention on genuine tensions in the composition. The woman’s isolation and the separation of the child can disturb, while the rider’s reaching hands and the infant’s energy can suggest help. Heppner’s reading is presented here through Butlin’s account, rather than as a meaning Blake explicitly recorded for the print. ^[2]

The farther rider introduces a further question. Butlin reports Heppner’s suggestion that the nearer figure embodies Pity and the farther one Wrath. He also allows a formal explanation: the outstretched arms may sustain the movement behind the nearer rider’s concentrated action. The contrast between the two gestures is clear, while the identification of opposed powers remains an interpretation. Their differing postures can sharpen our attention without settling every figure into a fixed role. ^[2]

The Songs make a similarly varied setting for compassion. The Divine Image gives pity a human face and places it among the virtues through which divine life becomes present in people. The Human Abstract begins by asking whether pity would exist if people were not made poor. Its concern reaches from the feeling itself towards the conditions that continually produce a need for it. Taken together, these complete poems encourage a reader to value care while questioning the arrangements through which suffering persists. ^[6]

The picture can sustain that double attention. Its approaching hands matter because another life is vulnerable; its exposed woman makes vulnerability impossible to overlook. A hopeful reading need not make her suffering disappear, and a troubling reading need not cancel the possibility of help. Blake’s figures keep those responses close together. The drama lies in the relation between them, where compassion must take some visible form. ^{[1] [2]}

A printed foundation and a painted life

Tate describes its impression as colour print, ink and watercolour on paper. Its current support measurement is 425 × 539 millimetres, a little over half a metre wide. The scale accommodates both the long horizontal bodies and the much smaller gestures at the centre. Lines clarify the hair, fingers and folds, while areas of colour have a broken, varied texture. The surface combines broad masses with marks fine enough to reward close attention. ^[1]

The exact printing procedure has been described differently. The Metropolitan Museum labels its impression a relief etching printed in colour and finished by hand. Joseph Viscomi’s 2017 study instead places Pity among designs printed from gessoed millboard. His account treats the painted matrix and subsequent finishing as opportunities for variation. These are distinct technical accounts of a process whose surviving results combine transfer, drawing and painting. ^{[16] [17]}

The effect of that combination is visible throughout. A printed area can establish a broad body or patch of darkness, while a drawn boundary gives a hand or face its particular expression. The picture’s emotional precision depends on those small distinctions. The rider does not merely bend down: her fingers approach the child at different angles, and her face turns towards the contact. Colour and line together make the gesture attentive. ^[1]

Three impressions, individual surfaces

Three full-size impressions survive at Tate, the Metropolitan Museum and the Yale Center for British Art. Viscomi sequences them as first, second and third pulls in 1795. He also records a 1794 watermark for Tate’s sheet, a date for its paper rather than proof that the image was printed that year. Tate’s present collection date remains about 1795. ^{[1] [2] [16]}

Comparing the Tate reproduction with the Met’s impression reveals how much can change while the design remains recognisable. The Met’s woman has a different pattern of dark folds across her lower garment, and the surrounding greens and pale passages establish a different balance of earth and air. The same poses survive, but the eye moves through another distribution of colour and emphasis. The Met’s sheet, accession 58.603, entered its collection as a gift from Mrs Robert W. Goelet in 1958. ^{[1] [17]}

Tate’s impression bears the surname Blake incised near the lower right. Viscomi links this manner of signing with Hecate and Satan Exulting over Eve, arguing that Butts acquired the three around 1795–96. This is a reconstructed early sale, distinct from a dated receipt for Pity. ^{[2] [16]}

The design before its final form

The composition developed through drawings as well as printing. Butlin identifies two preliminary pencil studies in the British Museum, the earlier upright and the later horizontal. A smaller colour print in that collection occupies an intermediate stage. These related works show that the broad format and arrangement were choices reached through development. The finished picture’s long bodies make its width feel inevitable, but the earlier upright study preserves a different possibility. ^[2]

That study also helps establish the subject. Frederick Tatham inscribed it with a reference to Shakespeare’s pity and the newborn babe. Butlin notes that no title written by Blake has been identified on the Tate impression’s margin. The familiar name is therefore supported by the drawing’s later inscription and the close relationship with Macbeth, without requiring an invented title statement from the artist. ^{[2] [3]}

The Tate sheet passed through Thomas Butts and his descendants before being sold through Carfax to W. Graham Robertson in 1906. Robertson presented it to Tate in 1939. Its history joins a private patron’s collection to a public one, while the image retains the intimacy of a scene built around a child and a pair of approaching hands. The vast wind carries the riders across the darkness; their downward attention makes that movement an encounter with vulnerable life. ^{[1] [2]}