Satan in his Original Glory, Thou wast Perfect till Iniquity was Found in Thee

A young, crowned figure faces us with his arms extended, balancing an orb in one hand and a sceptre in the other. His feet hang above a scattering of stars. Behind him, wings rise in enormous curves, opening towards the upper corners and meeting in a pointed arch above his head. The composition gives him the commanding presence of a ruler receiving homage. Yet the title asks us to look at that splendour with knowledge of its future: this is Satan before the loss of his original perfection. ^[1]

William Blake painted the watercolour around 1805. Tate, which owns the sheet as N05892, records its medium as ink and watercolour on paper and its support as 42.9 by 33.9 centimetres. Its longer title, Satan in his Original Glory: “Thou wast Perfect till Iniquity was Found in Thee”, brings a biblical sentence into the encounter. The sentence belongs to Ezekiel’s lament over the king of Tyre. Blake’s identification of this ruler with Satan gives the picture its particular tension. ^[1]

A body surrounded by splendour

Blake places the figure almost exactly on the upright centre of the sheet. The face looks out, the torso remains open to view, and the arms descend gently towards the two royal objects. There is little suggestion of the effort required to hold so much space. The weight of the orb rests on an upturned palm; the other hand allows the long sceptre to continue the line of the arm. Authority appears through possession and display.

The wings make that display immense. Their upper curves stretch beyond the width of the body several times over, while long inner feathers draw the eye upwards from the shoulders. Lower feathers overlap in a succession of rounded ends beside the legs. These repeated curves keep the central anatomy from feeling isolated: the figure seems enclosed within a structure that is also expanding around him.

His head has its own smaller architecture. Curls cluster around the face, and the crown rises to a little star at its summit. Across the chest passes a diagonal band of coloured ornaments. A mantle falls behind and beside the body, edged with further red and dark accents. Fine folds of pale drapery cross the hips and thighs, allowing the drawn structure of the legs to remain legible. The meeting of flesh, cloth, feathers and jewels creates a richness of surfaces without concealing the human form.

The face is quieter than its surroundings. Its eyes are open and its mouth closed. The expression does not announce the malice a viewer may expect from the name Satan. This restraint makes the sentence in the title more consequential. The future judgement has to enter through our knowledge of the story, while the figure continues to present himself in beauty.

Ezekiel’s king of Tyre

Ezekiel 28 begins with an address to the prince of Tyrus, the King James Bible’s form of Tyre. The ruler has grown rich through wisdom and trade, and his wealth has encouraged him to claim divine status. The prophetic response insists upon his mortality: enemies will attack him, and his assertion of godhood will not protect him from death. The subject at this point is explicitly a human ruler. ^[12]

A second address, beginning at verse 11, introduces a lament over the king of Tyre. Its language carries the ruler into an extraordinary setting. He has been in Eden, covered with precious stones and gold; musical instruments were prepared in him at his creation. He is described as the anointed covering cherub, placed on God’s holy mountain among stones of fire. Verse 15 then joins original perfection to the discovery of iniquity. The passage moves from magnificence towards expulsion and destruction. ^[12]

The lament does not leave the earlier concerns behind. Merchandise, violence and corrupted sanctuaries enter its account of the fall. Beauty has raised the ruler’s heart, and brightness has corrupted his wisdom. His punishment makes him a spectacle before other kings. Those details keep pride, political power and commerce within the passage even as its imagery expands into a divine garden. The chapter ends by turning to judgement on Sidon and the promised gathering and safety of Israel. It belongs to a wider prophetic account of nations and their fate. ^[12]

Satan is not named anywhere in the chapter. Tate’s catalogue acknowledges the distinction: the text addresses the prince of Tyre but has been read as referring more generally to Satan. Blake’s watercolour participates in that interpretive history. Its subject can be identified through the later Satan reading while the passage’s named royal addressee remains in view. The orb, sceptre and crown become especially apt in a picture whose biblical foundation already concerns a ruler’s dangerous conception of his own power. ^[1]

The abbreviated sentence attached to the picture also concentrates a movement through time. Perfection is remembered from a point at which iniquity has already been found. Even an image showing the earlier splendour therefore carries the later accusation within its name. The viewer sees a magnificent being and reads towards his loss.

Precious stones made human

The smallest forms reward a slower look. Around the lower wings and mantle, little beings curl within rounded shapes, bend over objects, stretch their arms or tip through the surrounding space. On either side of the lower body, groups of slender figures extend towards trumpet-like tubes with flared ends. Other instruments curve among them. Stars of different sizes and pointed shapes gather beneath the suspended feet.

This region is unusually restless beside the main figure’s frontal stillness. The little bodies turn in many directions. Some present faces, others rounded backs or bent heads. They seem to inhabit the ornaments as much as accompany them. Looking from one side of the sheet to the other reveals repeated kinds of form without the regularity of a decorative border. Each cluster has its own activity.

Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue entry reads these beings as personifications of the precious stones and musical instruments with which the biblical figure was endowed. That account makes Blake’s transformation of Ezekiel particularly vivid. The King James text supplies a covering of named stones together with tabrets and pipes; Blake gives the surrounding richness bodily life. Ornament becomes a population. ^{[1] [12]}

In several of the tiny forms, the distinction between an object and a person is difficult to settle. A rounded jewel seems to contain a head; a limb continues into an instrument; a bent body becomes part of a flowing contour. This is where the painting’s abundance acquires its strangeness. The principal figure possesses a clear, continuous anatomy, while the beings around him appear caught between human shapes and the things they embody.

Butlin also identifies the orb and sceptre as Blake’s additions, relating them to Satan’s position as Prince of this World. They are immediately recognisable signs of rule, unlike the more elusive small creatures. Together, the two kinds of detail establish different ways of looking: the regalia let us understand the figure at once, while the animated ornaments draw us into his surrounding world. ^[1]

A connection in Blake’s own poetry

Tate points to Blake’s Milton as evidence that the association between Tyre’s ruler and Satan belongs within Blake’s own work. On plate 9, Satan declares his exclusive divinity in language recalling the claim challenged by Ezekiel. This is Blake’s illuminated poem, a separate work from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The watercolour need not be assigned to an episode in the latter poem to explain its biblical foundation. ^[1]

The surrounding action in Blake’s poem sharpens the connection. Satan has taken over Palamabron’s labour under the appearance of kindness, caused disorder and then accused the person he has injured. His mildness makes the conflict difficult for others to judge. By plate 9, his claim to divine authority accompanies laws, punishments and the demand that everyone obey his principles. The borrowed biblical language operates within a drama of usurped work and accusation. ^[13]

His body then changes. Inner fires remain, but its stones become opaque, and his breast opens into an abyss hidden by darkness. Near the plate’s end, Tyre appears by name alongside Rome and Babylon in the place of the Covering Cherub. Brightness, stones, covering and a false claim to godhood have entered Blake’s own account of Satan’s separation from divine vision. ^[13]

The poem gives us a useful companion to the picture’s suspended moment. It shows how apparent generosity and splendour can become involved in domination. It does not provide a label for each little figure or establish that the watercolour illustrates those particular verses. Its value is the evidence it offers for Blake’s active reworking of the same scriptural materials.

How innocent is this glory?

Tate’s display caption presents the figure as a perfect part of creation before his fall. That reading honours the temporal contrast in the title and the absence of an overtly threatening action. Butlin’s catalogue adds a possible classical source: Janet Warner proposed that the pose derives from Apollo in Vincenzo Cartari’s mythographic book, first published in 1556. The proposal remains a scholarly comparison reported by the catalogue, rather than documentary proof that Blake copied a particular page for this sheet. It nevertheless draws attention to the open, balanced display of the youthful body. ^[1]

David Sten Herrstrom offers a darker reading in his study of Ezekiel’s imagery in Blake. His discussion of this watercolour interprets the surrounding stars and contracted little beings as signs of fallen, fragmented life. He understands the Covering Cherub as a deceptive counterpart to the unified divine body. On that account, the splendour already contains the disorder it seems to overcome. His argument about Blake’s Jerusalem gives the small figures a more troubled role than their identification as animated jewels alone would suggest. ^[14]

Returning to the image allows both readings to be tested. The central figure is upright, composed and beautifully proportioned. Around him, bodies bend, turn and lose the stability he possesses. Their scale makes them easy to overlook, but their activity changes the character of his stillness. The picture offers enough harmony to make perfection persuasive and enough agitation to make that harmony uneasy.

The biblical lament supplies a reason for holding those impressions together. The ruler’s beauty and brightness become the occasions of his pride. The source itself places splendour close to danger. Blake’s figure can therefore reward admiration without giving us a secure moral conclusion from appearance alone.

The colour we can no longer see

The present watercolour has also been transformed by light. Tate’s September 2004 caption identifies it as an extreme case of damage from overexposure. Much of the blue sky has faded; traces survive near the lower edge where the old mount protected the washes. The paper has yellowed considerably. These changes affect the relationship between the radiant figure and the space around him. ^[1]

Tate states that the vermilion used for the flesh and the red ochre in the wings have survived unaltered, while no evidence remains of yellow gamboge or pinkish red lakes. The surviving warm accents therefore have a different material history from the lost blue. A reproduction’s pale or creamy passages cannot simply be treated as Blake’s complete original colour scheme. Nor can the vanished colours be restored by imaginative description. ^[1]

This matters particularly for the impression of radiance. A stronger blue field would have changed the contrasts around the wings, mantle and scattered forms. We can recognise that lost relationship without pretending to recover its exact appearance. Today the thin outlines, overlapping feathers and little red touches carry much of the image’s clarity. The picture continues to disclose Blake’s organisation of bodies and ornaments through a surface whose colour balance has suffered substantially.

From the Butts collection to Tate

The sheet’s history preserves another change in how it has been encountered. Butlin records a monogrammed signature at the lower right and an inscription on an old mount, since replaced. That mount carried the title beginning with original perfection, a reference to Ezekiel 28 and part of the biblical text. The biblical wording was therefore part of the work’s former framing. ^[1]

The provenance begins with Thomas Butts and follows the work through his family. Butlin explains that two later titles apparently led Rossetti to list the same watercolour twice. One entry used the sentence from Ezekiel; another followed the 1853 sale title, Satan in his Former Glory. This small cataloguing history shows the two ways into the picture operating side by side: a scriptural lament and a named Satan. They described one sheet. ^[1]

In 1906 the work passed through the Carfax Gallery to the collector W. Graham Robertson. His executors presented it to Tate through the Art Fund in 1949. Art Fund’s acquisition account explains that Robertson’s charitable estate allowed his executors to purchase selected drawings at the sale of his collection for gifts to public museums. The watercolour’s arrival at Tate belongs to that wider distribution of Blake’s work. ^{[1] [15]}

Beside Satan Exulting over Eve, this upright figure offers a different arrangement of power: a solitary sovereign displays a world around himself. Blake’s later Paradise Lost illustrations develop other encounters between Satan’s beauty and his actions. Here the most revealing return is to the tiny beings beside the mantle. Their movement keeps the magnificent central figure from being the only life we see.