Comments on: Great and marvellous are thy works...

Great and marvellous are thy works...

hermitosis — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:51:32 -0800

The Book of Job, as illustrated by William Blake, in high resolution. He was 68 when he finished it in 1826, but died the following year before he could finish giving Dante's "Inferno" the same treatment. (Complete Blake Archive.)

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:56:41 -0800

Is it just me, or is this an illustration of Mathowie running Metafilter? I'll leave it to your imagination to name all the users visible.

By: hortense

hortense — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 22:03:05 -0800

Beautiful. thanks.

By: hermitosis

hermitosis — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 22:04:40 -0800

Oh yeah, well this is me, running this thread! Go on, just curse Mathowie, and all the hurting will end...

By: IronLizard

IronLizard — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 22:05:38 -0800

Metatalk

By: luftmensch

luftmensch — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 22:06:03 -0800

blue_beetle, impossible. Not one of them is wearing pants.

By: piratebowling

piratebowling — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 22:09:24 -0800

Love it. Thanks hermie.

By: hermitosis

hermitosis — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 22:10:20 -0800

Over-moderation.

By: McLir

McLir — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 22:11:15 -0800

The Book of Job in animation. Very accurate.

By: fingerbang

fingerbang — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 22:11:29 -0800

Thank you, lovely - bookmarked, favorited.

By: hermitosis

hermitosis — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 22:13:44 -0800

Yes, McLir.

By: Dreamghost

Dreamghost — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 23:49:59 -0800

awesome find

By: cardamine

cardamine — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 01:57:14 -0800

I found that archive not long ago, it is truly awesome. Great post.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 02:11:52 -0800

I had a building job one summer in Peckham, and would eat my lunch with my back resting on the trunk of the tree on Peckham Rye where Blake was supposed to have seen the angels. That was one of my favourite things about those years in London; surrounded by all that history. Blake was one of those greats where you'd keep coming across locations associated with him. I'd read Ackroyd's biography, so when I had another job up near Old Street I knew to go and sit by his grave in the Dissenter's plot at Bunhill Fields. Or you'd pass the blue plaque that marked the house he was born in crawling home from a drunk down in Soho. Then of course there was the Blake room at the Tate. Excuse the ramble, great post!

By: criticalbill

criticalbill — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 02:16:33 -0800

wow, thats extraordinary. I once downloaded a scan of Blake's (now what the fuck was it...um the famous one you know [after very long trawl through various harddrives] Songs of Innocence and Experience, and it was fucking shit, you couldn't read the text for all the pixellating. But this, this is infinitely better and its on the net

By: lodurr

lodurr — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 05:26:26 -0800

Ye gods, Blake was an amazing illustrator. Way ahead of his time. Or maybe, not really suited to any time. I can't honestly say I love his work, but I'm always really, really impressed by it.

By: fuse theorem

fuse theorem — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 06:03:40 -0800

Thank you! I will add this to my collection of interpretations of and variations on the Book of Job.

By: rmmcclay

rmmcclay — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 06:19:48 -0800

Nice find. Thanks. =)

By: hermitosis

hermitosis — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 06:26:05 -0800

I have a copy of this in book form, fuse theorem, but it's just the plates with no color. Still pretty great though. So, I just went to Amazon to get the link for you, and discovered that they're selling it for $41.55. Holy cow, I found mine for $6 at a used book shop!

By: mek

mek — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 06:26:07 -0800

As an atheist I must confess Blake has a knack for making Christianity truly beautiful. It's a shame his works (outside of that damned tyger) are largely neglected.

By: hermitosis

hermitosis — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 06:59:29 -0800

Part of what makes his Christianity so beautiful is his contempt for the forces that corrupted it and his modest hope that he could somehow correct that wrong. I have been reading his The Book of Urizen over and over for two years; it's Blake's creation myth, a sort of gnostic meta-myth that acts as a Kevlar wrapper for the Book of Genesis to protect people from its muddled message.

By: juiceCake

juiceCake — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 07:09:20 -0800

For more insight on Blake one has to have a read of Frye's Fearful Symmetry. An outstanding work and the foundation for Frye's later critical universe.

By: caddis

caddis — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 08:22:11 -0800

great post

By: MrMoonPie

MrMoonPie — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 09:59:26 -0800

I knew I'd seen this, or something like it, before. Kinda.

By: Squid Voltaire

Squid Voltaire — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 14:03:03 -0800

Lodurr, if you think his illustrations are way ahead of his time, you should try his writing! Joyce? Burroughs? Amateurs.

By: lodurr

lodurr — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 04:46:30 -0800

I haven't read a ton of Blake, but I've read enough to understand what you mean, and I suppose you're right. But it seems to me that in another sense, he was very much of his time, in the sense that he reflected the bleeding edge of the era's thought and was taken very seriously by his peers. True, he prefigured later mystics, but he also drew heavily on Swedenborg. My sense (happy to have someone who knows more about this correct me) was that he wasn't precisely ignored in his time, but was nowhere near as influential in popular culture as, say, Shelley or Byron. So you've definitely got a point, there.