The Great Red Dragon Paintings - When William Blake Was Illustrating the Bible

Featured image: William Blake – The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, detail

Great works of art often come to us through popular culture. Especially if the works are from a more distant past, rendering them less known and present in our collective memory. Among such examples are William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon paintings, particularly The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun. The watercolor has been the inspiration behind the Hannibal Lecter prequel Red Dragon (2002), with the main character played by Ralph Fiennes being obsessed with the image and having a large tattoo resembling Blake’s dragon on his back. 

Comprising a collection with three other works, the painting is a powerful depiction of celestial struggles with a domineering, muscular figure of a dragon with spread wings atop a prostrated female figure glowing in yellow light.  

Returning to global attention, the collection of paintings is considered among the finest of Blake’s works depicting the eternal struggle between good and evil. Describing him as hardly an artist who created for “work’y-day men,” Alexander Gilchrist in Life of William Blake (1863) said that Blake was “‘a divine child’ whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens, and the earth.” His topics follow this depiction, with The Great Red Dragon series among its finest examples. 

The Great Red Dragon Paintings

And behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth. (Rev. 12:3–4)

The quote comes from the Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament that inspired Blake’s Red Dragon paintings. Created between 1805 and 1810, in a period when Europe reeled from the violence and turbulence created by the French Revolution, the paintings offer a contemplation on the motif of faith and Satan, who attempts to snatch a newborn son from the woman who stands for Virgin Mary and the church. The passage from the Revelation mentions a dragon and “a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet,” which are symbols traditionally linked with Mary. 

The dragon intends to punish the woman who has birthed the son of God, who will spread the Christian faith. The Revelation contains exhortations to Christians to uphold and preserve their faith before a number of allegorical stories that illustrate the effects of spiritual apostasy.

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, presently housed at the Brooklyn Museum, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun and The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea, both at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and The Number of the Beast is 666, at the Rosenbach Museum & Library complete the collection of illustrations from the Book of Revelations, and were a part of a big commission for Blake’s most important patron Thomas Butts, of over 100 works illustrating books of the Bible.  

A Vision of Duality

In The Great Red Dragon and Woman Clothed in the Sun, the woman rests on a silver moon, with the dragon above her. The scene is engulfed in darkness with storm clouds and wind, showing the woman rising upwards and escaping a deluge invoked by the dragon. The woman and the dragon are shown as mirror images, suggesting that good and evil are a duality, like darkness and light. 

William Blake, in A Vision of the Last Judgement, describes his vision of this duality:

I do not consider either the just, or the wicked, to be in a supreme state, but to be, every one of them, states of the sleep which the soul may fall into in its deadly dreams of good and evil, when it leaves Paradise following the serpent.

William Blake and the Infinite 

William Blake (1757 – 1827) was a British engraver, painter, and poet. While living in London, he experienced significant social and political change, which impacted his works significantly. Largely dismissed and ignored by the academy during his lifetime, Blake is today acknowledged as one of the most imaginative English poets and one of the greatest forefathers of English Romanticism.

From the age of ten, he was enrolled in a drawing school where, by the age of 15, he obtained a master engraver of book illustrations and prints status. Around the same time, encouraged by his family’s love of books, he started to write poetry. For a year, he attended the Royal Academy of Art but later dropped out as the teachings were not compatible with the direction of his work. 

Merging poetry and visual arts, he created unique works of illuminated poetry, using print, watercolour, and drawing techniques. Having his own printing shop and printing press helped him develop his ideas freely, and he created uncompromising works that drew from epic themes and his own beliefs more than from reality. 

Besides the Red Dragon series, his other notable works include Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789), The Ancient of Days (1794), Pity (1795), Isaac Newton (1795), The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (1799-1800), The Angels Hovering Over the Body of Christ in the Sepulchre (1805), The Ghost of a Flea (1819-20), The Lovers Whirlwind (1824-27), and Satan Before the Throne of God: When the Almighty was yet with me (1826).

Inspired by his extensive readings of Milton, the Bible, mythology, and other literature, and art studies of, for example, Gothic architecture and Renaissance artists, Blake’s sometimes eccentric works also responded to the uprisings and inequalities of his time, showing the subduing of humanity and the struggle of spirit in the upcoming times of new technological orders and the Industrial Revolution. 

Although Blake was influenced by the changing world he lived in, he saw the changes as part of broader, eternal struggles, confirmed in texts he read. 

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

He tried to clean his perception of the everyday and shunned depictions of reality for illustrations of the eternal.