Behold now Behemoth which I made with thee (Behemoth and Leviathan)

Painter, poet, and printmaker William Blake was an eccentric visionary and ardent nonconformist known for his mystical themes and innovative forms. Largely underappreciated by contemporary critics, Blake’s works are now lauded for their elusive symbolism and complex personal mythology. As one of his final and most commercially-successful projects, Blake produced a series of 22 engravings to illustrate the biblical Book of Job, which tells the story of a righteous man whose faith is tested by the trials of Satan. Blake identified with Job’s suffering, due to his own struggles with poverty and lack of critical recognition. The Job narrative also mirrors Blake's artistic vision: Blake was deeply opposed to academic art, and in his interpretation of the tale Job is transformed from despair to redemption through a spiritual belief in the power of individual imagination.

In Blake’s compositions, text and image are perfectly comingled in the tradition of the illuminated manuscript, as is most eloquently apparent in the border designs that he added late in the design process. Blake applied this integrated approach to the numerous series of illustrations that he produced throughout his lifetime. These included both images intended to accompany his own poetry and prophetic books—such as his Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem—as well as illustrations for the works of other writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. At the time of his death, Blake was feverishly working on an unfinished series of illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy.