Satan Exulting over Eve

Eve lies with her head thrown back and her hair spread across the ground. A thick serpent rises beside her face, passes over her body and winds around her legs. Above her, a winged warrior stretches almost the entire width of the picture. His arms open outwards, his weapons extend his reach, and his body appears suspended in a current of flame. William Blake gives the two human forms the same horizontal direction while making their conditions painfully different. One seems able to occupy the air; the other has become a resting place for coils. ^[1]

Satan Exulting over Eve belongs to Blake’s large colour-print designs of 1795. Two surviving impressions offer distinct encounters with its threatening splendour. Tate dates its sheet about 1795 and describes colour print, ink and watercolour on paper mounted on canvas. The Getty dates its impression 1795 and lists graphite, pen and black ink, and watercolour over a colour print. The common design survives through surfaces developed individually by hand. Their differences help explain both the picture’s material history and the difficulty of deciding exactly what its apparent victory means. ^{[1] [2]}

A warrior above a bound body

The hovering figure has an athlete’s physique. His chest faces us, his head turns upwards, and his legs extend towards the right. Behind his arms, the great wings end in hooked points. Their membranes make broad, curved compartments, giving the air around him a structure almost as substantial as his body. A round shield reinforces the circle behind one arm, while the long diagonal weapon runs across the opposite wing. Every extension makes his presence larger. ^{[1] [2]}

Yet the face gives less straightforward pleasure than the title might lead us to expect. The eyes look away from Eve, the eyebrows rise, and the mouth is slightly open. In the Getty impression these features are particularly clear. An expansive gesture can suggest triumph without becoming a happy expression. The figure’s attention seems directed beyond the body below him, as though conquest has failed to settle whatever occupies his mind.

Eve’s position offers another kind of extension. Her legs follow the lower edge, her near arm rests beside her, and the fingers remain open against the ground. Her hair forms a loose, irregular mass around the head. Where the warrior’s limbs reach into the surrounding space, her contours are repeatedly crossed. The serpent interrupts the shoulder, waist and legs, turning a continuous human body into a succession of enclosed portions.

Its head is especially intrusive. Raised above her upper body, with a ridged crest and a sharply defined eye, it looks towards the right. Its neck climbs from the ground near her hair before returning across her. That long curve gives it an activity entirely its own. The creature seems capable of moving between levels of the picture while Eve remains close to the earth. The coils also make the title’s relationship visible: the apparently free figure above has a second presence below, occupying the space around his victim. Getty’s description calls the serpent Satan’s alter ego. ^[2]

The two bodies nearly fill their respective bands. There is little garden left in which to imagine ordinary movement, conversation or work. Sweeping red and pale passages behind Satan replace a spacious landscape, while the narrow foreground presses Eve towards the edge. Blake brings the encounter close enough that its unequal distribution of movement becomes unavoidable. The image asks us to experience dominion through posture before explaining it through a story.

What Genesis tells us—and what Blake adds

Genesis 3 supplies the serpent, the woman and the consequences of temptation, but its action differs from this arrangement. The serpent questions the command about the forbidden tree and promises knowledge. The woman eats and gives fruit to her husband, who also eats. Both recognise their nakedness, make coverings and hide. Questioning, accusation, judgement, clothing and expulsion follow. The chapter does not describe Eve lying beneath a winged conqueror. Nor does it name its serpent Satan. That identification belongs to the Christian interpretation through which the subject has commonly been understood. ^[3]

These differences help us see how much Blake has concentrated. There is no exchange of fruit between the couple, and Adam has disappeared from the composition. The woman’s part in a sequence of choices and conversations becomes a bodily condition. Her recumbency cannot establish that she has died, fainted or fallen asleep at a particular biblical moment: Genesis describes none of those events for her here. The deep sleep associated with the creation of woman belongs to Adam in the preceding chapter. ^[3]

The absence of Adam is affecting. In the text, the two human beings become conscious of nakedness together and answer separately for what has happened. Blake places Eve alone beneath the consequences of an encounter. Her exposed body is available to our sight while the figure overhead turns his face elsewhere. The imbalance concerns who can act, who can look away, and who remains physically vulnerable.

Genesis also gives the serpent’s success a future limit. The judgement establishes enmity between the serpent and the woman, and between their offspring, including the opposed wounds to head and heel. The chapter moves beyond the act of eating towards a struggle whose outcome is still ahead. Read within that context, the print’s title describes a claim to victory that need not be final. The creature possesses Eve’s immediate space, but the scriptural story does not leave its power unchallenged. ^[3]

Milton’s beautiful deceiver

Paradise Lost gives a more explicit connection between Satan and the serpent. In Book IX, Satan approaches Eve within the animal’s form. He finds her alone among the flowers, and her beauty briefly interrupts his malice. The interruption ends when pleasure renews his awareness of what he cannot possess. He recalls his purpose and begins the flattery that will bring her towards the tree. Milton lets attraction, envy and the decision to destroy follow closely upon one another. ^[14]

The serpent itself is beautiful in Milton’s description. It rises on circular folds, with a crested head and a shining green-gold neck. Its movements court Eve’s attention before its voice persuades her. Blake’s large, patterned creature can be considered beside that seductive magnificence. But his composition separates the warrior’s body from the serpent’s, making two forms visible at once where Milton describes an enemy enclosed within an animal. The viewer receives knowledge that the woman in the poem lacks. ^[14]

Milton’s sequence also prevents us from assigning Blake’s whole picture to the instant after Eve eats. At that moment in Book IX, the guilty serpent retreats into the thicket. Eve remains occupied with the fruit and then considers how to approach Adam. The epic supplies no corresponding passage in which the winged Satan spreads himself above her reclining body. Getty’s 1988 catalogue explicitly acknowledges the Miltonic resemblance while declining to connect the print directly with a particular passage. Its caution allows the picture to be an invention drawing on the poem’s imaginative world. ^{[14] [15]}

The later triumph in Book X provides a revealing comparison. Returning to Hell, Satan announces his success and waits for applause. He hears hissing instead. His own body then changes against his will, and he falls into the form of a serpent; his followers undergo the same humiliation. Milton turns victory into an exposure of captivity. Blake’s separate warrior and snake do not literally illustrate that transformation, but a reader who remembers it can feel how unstable the magnificence above Eve may be. ^[14]

Book X also frames the human judgement through the Son’s role as mediator and promised redeemer. The serpent’s sentence anticipates Satan’s eventual defeat. This wider perspective matters when bringing Milton to the print: the epic surrounds the deceiver’s success with a future that overturns his claim to mastery. Blake has left that larger action outside the picture, concentrating our attention on the bodies immediately before us. ^[14]

Tate’s March 2011 label approaches the beautiful Satan through eighteenth-century responses to Milton. It suggests that the snake concentrates the evil which the splendid human form does not readily disclose. The label brings in Johann Caspar Lavater’s physiognomic association of the serpent with cunning. This is a historical way of interpreting appearance and moral character, presented by the museum as a context for the design. The visible distinction remains compelling even without treating bodily beauty or an animal’s shape as a reliable moral test. ^[1]

Two impressions, two encounters

The surviving museum objects are Tate’s T07213 and Getty’s 84.GC.49. Tate gives the image dimensions as 43.2 by 53.4 centimetres; Getty gives its unframed sheet as 42.5 by 53.5 centimetres. Those labels describe different measurements and should be kept with their respective objects. Their closely related formats let us compare the composition without assuming that every contour or coloured passage was reproduced unchanged. ^{[1] [2]}

The clearest difference concerns Satan’s legs. In the Getty impression, a second leg extends above the nearer one and ends in a pointed foot near the right edge. Tate’s version lacks that clearly articulated far leg. The change makes the lower silhouette more compact: the body and the long foreground leg dominate where the Getty image opens a narrow interval between two extended limbs. The 1988 Getty catalogue identifies the missing leg as a distinguishing feature of the other impression, then owned by John Craxton and now at Tate. The entry also describes substantial overpainting on that sheet. ^[15]

The reproductions also disclose different balances of colour and modelling. Getty’s flesh is paler, the facial features more legible, and the red passages behind the wings feel more exposed. Tate’s face and torso emerge from a darker field, while greens in the wings and serpent occupy more of the picture’s attention. The lower creature appears especially substantial against the muted human form. The differences change where the eye pauses within the familiar arrangement.

Such comparisons need the scale of the object as well as the scale of the screen. A small reproduction can flatten the mottling into general darkness and make the missing leg difficult to recognise. Enlarging the institutional images restores the fine divisions in the wings, the reptile’s patterned surface and the lines around fingers. It also reveals why the two impressions cannot be treated as interchangeable illustrations with a single physical history. What is repeated is the design; what survives is an individually worked sheet.

The printing order has itself been revised. In 1988 Getty’s catalogue called the Craxton impression the second pull. Joseph Viscomi’s 2017 reconstruction places the Tate impression third, the Getty impression tentatively second, and an untraced impression tentatively first. Viscomi leaves those first two positions provisional. Two surviving sheets can be compared directly; the proposed earlier one belongs to a reconstructed history. The older and newer accounts agree about visible differences while arranging their production differently. ^{[15] [16]}

Colour transferred, then worked by hand

The printed foundation and the painted finish can sometimes be followed within one passage. Getty draws attention to the fibrous, uneven, opaque colour beneath Eve and contrasts it with the smoother red washes behind Satan. The contrast helps explain the surface without reducing it to a simple division between a completed print and a few decorative additions. Transferred colour supplies an irregular field; subsequent wash and drawn contour can strengthen, redirect or partly conceal it. ^[2]

The printing support requires more caution. Getty’s older catalogue and current explanation describe a design painted on board and transferred to paper. Viscomi proposes that Satan Exulting over Eve, like Elohim Creating Adam, was printed from an unetched metal plate. He connects the two with the similarly sized God Judging Adam, whose matrix he identifies as a relief-etched copperplate. His account distinguishes those supports from the prepared millboards he assigns to other large designs. A general board-printing recipe therefore does not settle the precise manufacture of this composition. ^{[2] [15] [16]}

In his 2022 discussion, Viscomi describes paint being transferred by an engraver’s rolling press to dampened paper, followed by further colour and pen work. His term printed paintings captures the importance of both indirect and direct applications. The surviving sheet carries the impression of a prepared surface and the further decisions made upon that impression. This accounts for the intimate relationship between the rough ground and the controlled anatomy without requiring every mark to have originated in the same operation. ^[17]

Viscomi also distinguishes a monoprint from a wholly improvised monotype. A repeatable underlying design makes another impression possible, while renewed colour and finishing make that impression individual. Here the distinction has an immediate visual consequence. The warrior, woman and serpent recur, but the visibility of a limb, the modelling of a face and the density of a coloured field can change. Repetition gives Blake another occasion to develop a picture. ^[16]

Tate’s canvas mounting belongs to this material history too. Its collection description records the paper together with that additional support. The mounting, the transfer of colour, the painted finish and the original invention are separate features of the surviving object; the current record does not date every stage. A canvas backing does not turn the medium into an oil painting, just as the presence of printed colour does not make the handwork incidental. ^[1]

What a signature can date

Getty records a brown-ink signature at the lower right, containing Blake’s name and 1795. Tate’s impression carries a different form: the surname scratched through the coloured surface. Viscomi compares that scratched signature with those on Tate’s Pity and The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy. These small marks bring the objects’ histories into view at a different scale from the enormous wings and bodies. ^{[2] [16]}

The argument concerns when signing happened. As Viscomi reports Martin Butlin’s position, the three scratched signatures were made at execution in 1795, while the works were sold later, after 1805. Viscomi challenges the assumption that scratching required wet paint. He argues that the marks are more readily understood as cuts through a dry surface and proposes that Blake signed the three impressions together when selling them to Thomas Butts around 1795–96. The proposed early purchase follows from comparisons of signatures and collecting history; it is not a newly discovered dated receipt for this print. ^[16]

Getty’s signature leads to a different proposed chronology. Viscomi groups it with similarly written signatures on particular impressions of Nebuchadnezzar and The House of Death. Since the relevant Nebuchadnezzar was printed later, he argues that the shared style points towards signing around 1805–07. On that reconstruction, a sheet printed in 1795 could receive its dated autograph roughly a decade afterwards. The number in the signature does not have to identify the moment when pen met paper. ^[16]

The Getty impression’s earliest ownership also remains uncertain. Its 1988 catalogue places question marks beside Catherine Blake, Frederick Tatham, Joseph Hogarth and John Ruskin. That list records possibilities, not an uninterrupted documented descent. Viscomi’s argument for a lifetime sale offers another reconstruction without identifying a secure first buyer. ^{[15] [16]}

These interpretations give the two sheets distinct possible journeys out of Blake’s workshop. They also preserve a useful difference between evidence and reconstruction. A signature can be inspected; its relationship to a sale is argued. A collection date can identify the work broadly without supplying the date of every later wash or inscription. Tate’s documented purchase in 1996 marks a much later, firm point in its public history. It does not resolve the earlier sequence of printing, finishing and signing. ^{[1] [16]}

A possible companion, an independent picture

The proposed relationship with Elohim Creating Adam opens another way of looking. In that design, a powerful winged creator extends above a male body whose legs are entangled by a coiling creature. The repetition makes Eve’s isolation here especially striking. Both pictures bring an imposing being close to a vulnerable human form, but the actions and expressions differ. Together they can make creation and the Fall feel uncomfortably near one another.

Getty’s 1988 catalogue reports the suggested pairing and cites Butlin’s interpretation of Satan Exulting over Eve as a second stage of the Fall, involving division into two sexes. That account reads the image through a larger understanding of Blake’s thought. It extends beyond the literal action of Genesis 3, and it remains a proposed relationship between independent works. The physical resemblance gives the comparison force without proving a fixed two-picture sequence or a single authorised reading order for all twelve large designs. ^[15]

Viscomi’s 2022 essay explicitly directs readers towards a counterargument to the traditional view of a unified series: the large prints can be understood as autonomous designs without an ideal reading order. This approach leaves room for illuminating relationships while allowing each encounter its own duration. Eve’s body and the serpent do not need to become a numbered step in an invisible programme before we can recognise the image’s concentration on possession and restricted movement. ^[17]

The same independence matters when approaching Blake’s later Paradise Lost illustrations. The Thomas, Butts and Linnell watercolour projects date to 1807, 1808 and 1822. Satan Exulting over Eve precedes them and belongs to a different undertaking. Its resemblance to later Miltonic serpents offers a connection across Blake’s career, while its broad printed surface and concentrated confrontation give it a character of its own. ^[18]

Return finally to the distance between the two heads. Satan looks up and away; Eve’s face tilts back beneath the serpent’s raised neck. No answering glance passes between them. His magnificence fills the air, but the creature’s coils show where power takes effect. Blake makes triumph visible as a distribution of freedom: the reach of one body is set against the confinement of another. The beauty of the warrior gives that unequal relationship its disturbing hold.