Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils

Satan stretches his arms across a sky of dark clouds and pink wings. Beneath him, Job lies almost the full width of the foreground, his head thrown back and his hands open beside his body. At his feet, his wife bends so deeply that her face disappears behind her hair. William Blake’s Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils brings the three bodies into an encounter of terrible intimacy. Satan has room to extend himself; the people beneath him have scarcely any room in which to resist. ^[1]

The painting in Tate is a small horizontal panel, catalogued about 1826, in ink and tempera on mahogany. Its support measures 326 by 432 millimetres. Its compact size intensifies the monumental effect: the wings nearly fill the sky, and Job’s exposed body occupies the land below. Blake returned here to a composition already used in his watercolour illustrations and the sixth engraving of the Book of Job. The panel gives that familiar design a new breadth and a conspicuous pair of wings. ^[1]

A body beneath the wings

Satan’s pose establishes the picture’s main structure. His arms extend almost horizontally, but his head inclines towards Job at the right. His torso bends slightly, one hip projecting as his legs descend towards the reclining man. The feet appear planted upon Job’s covering and body. This is an assailant who commands the space both above and immediately upon his victim. His open stance makes Job’s low position feel all the more confined. ^[1]

The wings amplify that reach. Pale pink membranes spread between long, sharply angled supports, with pointed upper edges and deeply scalloped lower ones. Their structure remains legible against the heavy clouds. They are an addition with real consequences: Satan’s limbs no longer provide the only measure of his power. An enormous second shape unfolds behind them, turning a human bodily gesture into something that seems able to occupy the weather itself. ^[1]

His face refuses the simple reassurance of a remote monster. It is close to Job’s, angled downwards, with parted lips and an intent gaze. The carefully modelled abdomen and thighs also retain the attractions of a powerful human body. Yet the scaly forms around the lower torso and the batlike wings make that strength disquieting. Blake allows physical beauty and cruelty to inhabit the same commanding figure. ^[1]

Below him, Job is still recognisably strong. His shoulders are broad, his chest substantial, and the arms have weight. Strength has ceased to provide protection. His legs extend towards the left, while his head and long hair fall back at the right. The body stretches across a rough, streaked surface whose lines seem to continue his helpless length. What Satan holds together in a single expansive gesture, Job experiences as exposure. ^[1]

The permission to touch Job

The biblical episode belongs to the second stage of Job’s trial. In chapter 1, Satan questions whether Job’s devotion depends upon his protected prosperity. God gives him power over what Job possesses, while forbidding an attack upon Job himself. Raids, fire and the destruction of the house where his children are gathered follow. Blake’s Job’s Sons and Daughters Overwhelmed by Satan gives the falling house its own dreadful scene. ^[12]

Chapter 2 renews the heavenly conversation. God says that Job has retained his integrity despite being afflicted without cause. Satan argues that bodily suffering will break the devotion that loss has failed to destroy. The new permission changes the boundary: Job is placed in Satan’s hand, but his life must be preserved. Satan then smites him with boils from foot to head, and Job takes a potsherd to scrape himself as he sits among ashes. ^[12]

These two permissions explain why the painting’s bodily closeness matters. The protection of Job’s person has been withdrawn. An argument conducted elsewhere now reaches skin, bone and flesh. Blake makes that transition visible through the feet pressing upon the reclining body and the long stream descending from Satan’s hand towards Job’s head. The power to afflict has become an action that can be followed across the picture. ^[1][12]

The opening judgement of Job also remains essential. The narrator calls him upright, and God repeats that assessment before and after the first disasters. The boils provide no evidence that he secretly deserves punishment. The scene is disturbing partly because the biblical framework has already denied the convenient explanation that suffering exposes guilt. Job’s helplessness is something to confront, not a verdict that the viewer is invited to endorse. ^[12]

Blake has supplied the encounter’s choreography. Scripture does not describe Satan’s wings, his stance, the extended arms or the wife’s place beside Job’s feet. The brief account of affliction leaves room for destructive power to acquire posture, pressure and direction. The painter concentrates the event into a meeting between an upright assailant and two people brought low. ^[1][12]

Hands, skin and the horizon

The hands make the attack unusually precise. At the left, Satan’s open palm releases several pointed streaks. At the right, his bent wrist holds a small vessel from which a much longer, pale stream descends towards Job. The two actions occupy opposite ends of the same outstretched body. One scatters force into the surrounding space; the other directs it upon the sufferer below. ^[1]

Job’s hands answer without matching that command. One rises behind Satan’s leg, palm turned out. The other lies open in the foreground beside the patterned covering over his lower body. Fingers are extended, but there is no effective grip or shield. These small gestures preserve a sense of response within the otherwise prostrate figure. The painting does not make him an inert object, even as it shows how little control his body can exercise. ^[1]

Colour carries the disturbance through the landscape. A pale sun lies low at the left, above a narrow strip of dark water. Red and pink radiance rises around it, enclosed by a descending succession of cloud curves. Beneath the clouds, cool blue-green land passes behind the figures. Small pale structures remain visible in the distance. The setting has depth, but that depth offers the afflicted pair no usable refuge. ^[1]

The cloud edges are especially insistent. Their repeated lobes turn the sky into a series of enclosing bands. Against them the wings spread a related pattern, angular where the clouds are rounded. Satan seems both sharply separate from the weather and uncomfortably at home within its forms. The distant sun is visible, yet the largest living body in the picture stands between the sufferers and the sky. ^[1]

Penelope Minney interprets the darkening sequence of the earlier Job designs as an experience of spiritual separation, and she discusses the traditional language of despair in Job’s reclining pose and his wife’s bent figure. Her principal subject is the Butts watercolour series, so its spiritual itinerary should be distinguished from the later panel. Her attention to bodily expression nevertheless helps us recognise how much Blake can communicate before a particular emblem is named: extension, collapse and withdrawal already carry an argument. ^[13]

His wife beside his feet

The wife makes a very different shape from either man. Her body folds into a high arch, while her head drops close to Job’s lower legs. Long hair hangs beside her face, and the pale dress descends in narrow folds around the bent knees. Her arms reach towards his feet. She remains within touching distance, although the gesture offers little sense that she can stop what is happening. ^[1]

Her position requires care because the biblical wife is often remembered through a single sentence. In Job 2:9 she asks whether he still retains his integrity and tells him to curse God and die. Job answers that she speaks as one of the foolish women and asks whether they should receive good from God without also receiving evil. The narrator then says that Job has not sinned with his lips. Those are distinct voices: the wife’s challenge, Job’s reply and the narrator’s assessment. ^[12]

The painting does not place that speech in her mouth. Her face is hidden, her attention directed downwards, and her body is occupied with grief. Reading her posture as a visible act of mockery would overlook what Blake has actually shown. Her nearness to Job keeps the affliction within a damaged relationship as well as an individual body. He suffers under Satan’s force; she bends beside the suffering she cannot prevent. ^[1]

Minney sets Blake’s treatment of the wife against competing traditions. Through her discussion of the Testament of Job and earlier art, she describes an alternative to the hostile wife: a companion who works to support Job and tends his sores. She emphasises the wife’s continuing presence in Blake’s later visions, where the couple share experiences that the biblical narrative does not explicitly give them together. Her account places companionship within the subject’s pictorial history, without proving a single source for this particular pose. ^[13]

In the panel, the contrast between the wife and Satan is immediate. Both occupy positions close to Job’s body, but their movements lead in opposite directions. Satan opens himself across the scene; she draws herself inward. His head turns towards the object of his attack, while hers is buried in the curve of her own grief. Her repeated pale folds give that withdrawal a sustained visible rhythm. The picture permits her to be overwhelmed without making her absence the condition of Job’s solitude. ^[1]

The engraving’s different resources

The related sixth engraving offers a revealing comparison. Satan has the same broad reach and downward-turned head, but lacks the panel’s large wings. Dense networks of cut lines model his body, cloud and landscape. The central arrangement is recognisably shared, while the surrounding sheet gives words and smaller images room to develop the episode. Tate’s separately identified impression, A00017, is a line engraving catalogued as 1825, reprinted in 1874. These dates describe that print’s history, not the mahogany panel. ^[14]

Above the engraving, Blake places Job’s acknowledgement that he came naked from his mother’s womb and will return naked, followed by his blessing of the Lord. The words come from Job 1:21, after the loss of possessions and children. Below the image, an adapted sentence from Job 2:7 names the boils and their extent across the body. By joining these moments on one page, Blake makes an earlier response to bereavement surround the later bodily assault. ^[12][14]

The upper inscription therefore adds a voice that the panel leaves unspoken. It also draws particular attention to the nude bodies. Job’s earlier declaration about entering and leaving life meets the stripped figure under Satan’s feet. The engraving asks the viewer to read an attitude towards loss alongside the visible torment. The panel concentrates the encounter through bodies, colour and the enormous spread of the wings. ^[1][14]

Smaller objects deepen the print’s margins. A broken vessel stands below the main inscription, near a broken shepherd’s crook, a grasshopper and other small forms. Minney’s discussion of plate VI connects the crook with Job’s former prosperity and the vessel with the potsherd used to scrape his skin. These marginal reminders bring possessions, fragility and bodily care into the same surrounding space. They belong to the engraved page; they should not be imagined as an invisible border to the painting. ^[13][14]

Theological readings of the design have also differed. Tate’s catalogue reports Wicksteed’s connection between Job’s affliction and the language of doubt, shame and bodily sin in Blake’s Jerusalem. Minney emphasises the despair of the poses, Job’s isolation and a Christian tradition that reads his suffering alongside Christ’s Passion. These approaches direct attention towards different aspects of the scene. Neither gives the viewer permission to treat the biblical Job’s damaged skin as a straightforward demonstration of moral corruption. ^[13][14]

Even the engraved declaration of submission needs its larger biblical setting. Chapter 3 gives Job an extended protest: he curses the day of his birth, asks why suffering people must continue to live, and imagines rest beyond their exhaustion. He does not fulfil Satan’s predicted curse of God. His speech nevertheless refuses the idea that endurance must be emotionally unbroken or silent. Remembering that voice allows the open hands and thrown-back head to retain their human difficulty. ^[12]

A late return to the composition

Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue proposes that the panel represents the composition’s final development. He compares it with the Butts watercolour, the Linnell watercolour, the preparatory drawing and the engraving, noting the added wings, more schematic clouds and increased monumentality. The museum’s date of about 1826 accompanies that reconstruction. It is a persuasive account of stylistic development, expressed as a judgement about the sequence rather than supported by a dated commission for this panel. ^[1]

The object itself also has a history distinct from the printed design. Tate records an incised signature at the lower right and an inscription on the back naming the former owners George Richmond and Frederick Locker. Mary H. Dodge presented the panel through the Art Fund in 1918. These details belong to a particular painted support, preserved and passed between collectors, while the engraved composition could continue its life through successive sheets of paper. ^[1]

The engraved suite was issued in 1826, although its publication lines carry the date 8 March 1825. The panel’s proximity to that undertaking makes Blake’s return especially interesting. A design that had acquired an elaborate verbal frame could still be reconsidered as a concentrated painted encounter. The new wings broaden Satan’s authority across the upper field, while the horizontal format lets Job’s helpless body answer it below. ^[1][14]

The next engraved subject, Job’s Comforters, introduces friends who scarcely recognise him and begin by mourning. Here, before their arrival, Blake keeps the field to three figures. The bent wife and extended Job occupy almost opposite conditions of the body, withdrawal and exposure, beneath an assailant whose limbs and wings span them both. That unequal distribution of movement gives the small panel its force: power can spread, suffering must remain, and the nearest companion can only bend towards it. ^[1][12]