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Art, Culture & Design
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Satan in Watercolour The Divine Tragedy of William Blake
Visionary artist William Blake reimagined Satan for John Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' Rejecting the monstrous devil of tradition, Blake painted a figure of sublime, melancholic beauty. His watercolours explore the tragic grandeur of the fallen archangel, challenging simple notions of good and evil.
A Different Kind of Devil
When we picture Satan, the mind often conjures a familiar image: a grotesque creature with crimson skin, sharp horns, and a pointed tail, a medieval caricature of pure evil. But in the early 19th century, the visionary poet and artist William Blake took up his brush and offered a radically different vision. Tasked with illustrating John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, Blake stripped away the demonic clichés and instead painted a fallen angel of breathtaking, tragic beauty. His Satan is not a monster to be feared, but a complex figure of sublime sorrow, a celestial being defined by what he lost.
The Artist as Mystic
To understand Blake’s art, one must first understand the man. William Blake (1757-1827) was an outlier in his own time. A poet, painter, and printmaker, he was also a mystic who claimed to experience divine visions from childhood. He saw angels in the trees of London and spoke with the spirits of historical figures. This spiritual life was the bedrock of his art. While deeply Christian, Blake was fiercely critical of organized religion and the rigid dogmas he believed stifled the human spirit and imagination. For him, the imagination was not a source of fantasy but the very essence of God, the divine spark within humanity. This unconventional faith allowed him to see Milton’s epic not just as a religious text, but as a profound psychological drama.
Giving Form to Milton's Rebel
John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) already presented a surprisingly complex antagonist. Milton's Satan is charismatic, eloquent, and driven by a burning sense of injustice. He is often considered one of literature's first anti-heroes. Blake was captivated by this portrayal and created three series of watercolour illustrations for the poem between 1807 and 1822. He didn't just translate Milton's words to paper; he engaged in a visual dialogue with them. Where the poem gives Satan powerful speeches, Blake gives him a powerful form, often modeled on the idealized nudes of classical Greek sculpture. In works like Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve, he is a figure of immense power and grace, his muscular form contorted not in monstrous rage, but in visible anguish and envy as he observes the paradise he can never regain.
An Argument in Paint
Blake’s illustrations are more than just accompaniments to the text; they are a reinterpretation of it. He famously declared that Milton was of a “true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.”
“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.”
For Blake, Satan represented rebellious energy and creative freedom, qualities he prized above all else. He contrasted this with the distant, authoritarian God of the Old Testament, a figure Blake associated with his own mythological creation, Urizen—a deity of cold reason and oppressive laws. In his art, Blake’s Satan becomes a symbol of the romantic rebel, a sublime figure whose fall is a tragedy of cosmic proportions. He is not evil incarnate but a powerful being corrupted by pride and despair, a portrayal that continues to influence how we see the fallen angel in modern culture, from literature to film.
Ultimately, William Blake’s watercolours for Paradise Lost challenge us to look beyond simple binaries of good and evil. They ask us to find the humanity and sorrow within the archetype of the devil, revealing a character whose profound beauty is matched only by the depths of his loss. In Blake's hands, Satan is not just the adversary of God, but a timeless symbol of tragic grandeur.