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An old man with a long, white beard and flowing, white hair sits surrounded by three young women in a gold-toned room in this horizontal painting. The people all have dark dots for eyes and touches of pink on the cheeks of their otherwise parchment-white skin. At the center of the composition, the man holds his arms out straight to his sides, lifted slightly above shoulder level, with his index fingers pointing and his middle fingers touching his thumbs to make a ring with each hand. He looks down to our right under bushy, furrowed brows, and his beard falls to his lap. His cream-white robe falls to the floor over his legs, but the toes of one foot peek out from under the hem. Two young women with blond hair sit to either side of him, leaning against his legs and sides. The woman to our left wears a harvest-yellow, long-sleeved gown, and she holds her hands pressed to her upper chest. The woman to our right wears a muted, rose-pink gown. The third woman, in front of the man, sits with her back to us, hands palm-down on the floor to either side of her, and her face resting on the man’s knees. Her blond hair is partially held in a net at the base of her skull, and her slate-blue gown pools around her. The edges of a ruby-red seat curl to either side of the women flanking the man. On the upper half of the wall opposite us, a roundel is flanked by a square panel to each side. We can barely make out the forms of some people in the monochromatic, caramel-brown sections. The floor is loosely patterned with muted red, black, royal blue, and butter yellow. Upon closer inspection, we find that the surface of the painting is cracked throughout.

William Blake

Job and His Daughters, 1799/1800

Not on View

Medium

pen and tempera on canvas

Dimensions

overall: 27.3 x 38.4 cm (10 3/4 x 15 1/8 in.)

framed: 40.6 x 51.4 cm (16 x 20 1/4 in.)

Credit Line

Rosenwald Collection

Accession Number

1943.11.11

Artists / Makers

William Blake (artist) British, 1757 - 1827

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
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Provenance

Painted for Thomas Butts [1757-1845];[1] by descent to Thomas Butts, Jr. (sale, Messrs. Foster, London, 29 June 1853, no. 86), bought by J.C. Strange, Highgate. (Harvey), London, by c. 1865. William Bell Scott by 1876 (sale, Sotheby's, London, 14 July 1892, no. 236), bought by (Bernard Quaritch), London. Charles Eliot Norton, Cambridge, Massachusetts [d. 1908]. Gabriel Wells. George C. Smith, Jr., by 1930 (sale, Parke-Bernet, New York, 2-3 November 1938, 1st day, no. 109, repro.), bought by (Rosenbach & Co.), Philadelphia, for Lessing J. Rosenwald, Philadelphia; gift to NGA, 1943.

[1] One of a series of over 135 illustrations to the Bible commissioned by Thomas Butts, Blake's most important patron.

Associated Names

Butts, Jr., Thomas
Butts, Thomas
Foster, Messrs.
Harvey
Norton, Charles Eliot
Parke-Bernet Galleries, Inc.
Quaritch Ltd., Bernard
Rosenwald, Lessing Julius
Scott, William Bell
Smith, Jr., George C.
Sotheby's, London
Strange, J.C.
Wells, Gabriel

Exhibition History

1876: The Works of William Blake, Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, 1876, no. 107.

1886: International Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art: Pictures of Works of Art, Edinburgh, 1886, no. 1442.

1930: Works of William Blake, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1930, unnumbered.

1939: William Blake 1757-11827: an Exhibition of the Works of William Blake selected from Collections in the United States, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1939, no. 148.

1957: The Art of William Blake, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1957, no. 4.

2000: William Blake, Tate Britain, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000-2001, no. 43, repro. (shown only in London).

Technical Summary

The medium-fine canvas is plain woven; it has been lined. The ground is white, thickly applied in animal glue and spongy in texture. There is a thin monochrome imprimatura covered by a layer of glue. The painting is executed thinly in glue tempera, a very thin layer containing the colored elements of the design being covered with a brownish layer; the linear details are added in black with a pen, with the final touches of white in a low impasto. There is an original surface coat of animal glue. The painting was described by William Rossetti in 1863 as "fearfully dilapidated. "[1] The paint is abraded and is actively flaking and cleaving; the surface coat has discolored to a very significant degree and has begun to delaminate from the paint. Extensive watercolor inpainting was carried out in 1938;[2] further watercolor inpainting was done in 1965, 1968, and in the early 1980s. The wax varnish has discolored gray.

[1] Gilchrist 1863, 2:215.[2] Philadelphia 1939, 97, under no. 148.

Bibliography

1863: "Rossetti, William. Annotated Catalogue". In Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of William Blake, "Pictor Ignotus." 2 vols. London and Cambridge, 1863: 2:no. 99.

1935: Binyon, Laurence, and (Sir) Geoffrey Keynes. Illustrations of the Book of Job by William Blake. New York, 1935: 46 (under no. 20).

1957: Keynes, Sir Geoffrey. William Blake's Illustrations to the Bible. Clairvaux (The Trianon Press), 1957: 22, no. 742, repro.

1965: Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 15.

1968: National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 8, repro.

1973: Lindberg, Bo. William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job. Abo, 1973: 23, 347, nos. xxvi, 20G.

1975: European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 30, repro.

1976: Rosenwald, Lessing J. Recollections of a Collector. New York, 1976: 97.

1977: Bindman, David. Blake as an Artist. Oxford, 1977: 209.

1981: Butlin, Martin. The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. 2 vols. New Haven and London, 1981: 1:no. 394; 2:color pl. 500.

1985: European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 49, repro.

1992: Hayes, John. British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1992: 17-19, repro. 18.

2004: Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 340-341, no. 275, color repro.