Nebuchadnezzar

William Blake

Color monotype in tempera, finished with pen, black ink, and watercolour on paper

Tate Britain

William Blake's Nebuchadnezzar (1795) is a large colour monotype print, finished with pen, black ink, and watercolour, depicting the Old Testament Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II in a state of divine punishment. Drawn from the Book of Daniel, the image shows the once-mighty ruler reduced to animal-like madness, crawling on all fours with wild eyes, long taloned nails, and skin mottled with unnatural hues of green, blue, and russet. Blake, an English poet, painter, and printmaker working at the threshold of Romanticism, infused the scene with profound symbolic meaning — the king's physical degradation embodying the moral catastrophe of a man enslaved to pride and sensation, stripped of the reason that distinguishes humanity from beast. The work belongs to Blake's celebrated series of twelve Large Colour Prints, considered among the most technically innovative and thematically ambitious productions of his career.