Job and His Daughters

William Blake

Glue tempera on canvas

National Gallery of Art

Painted in glue tempera on canvas for his most devoted patron Thomas Butts, William Blake's Job and His Daughters depicts the biblical patriarch seated at the center of the composition, arms extended to either side, surrounded by his three daughters who lean tenderly against him in a warm, gold-toned interior. Blake (1757–1827), the visionary English poet and painter, brought his characteristic linear precision and symbolic intensity to this scene from the Book of Job, rendering the figures with parchment-pale skin and pen-drawn linear detail over a thinly applied tempera ground. The work belongs to a large series of over 135 biblical illustrations Blake produced for Butts, representing one of the most sustained and ambitious projects of his career as a painter. Its intimate, hieratic composition anticipates the celebrated engraved Illustrations of the Book of Job published in 1826, widely regarded as Blake's supreme achievement in printmaking.