Critical Reception and Legacy
Of the edition of 315, only 20 copies of the illustrations were sold in Blake's lifetime, mostly to people within Blake's immediate circle (such as Samuel Palmer). However, the Illustrations brought Blake an unprecedented degree of recognition. The Royal Academy and the King's Library each bought a copy; the former also awarded Blake ₤25. Such notables as John Constable and Lady Caroline Lamb invited him to dine, and the collector Charles Alders introduced him to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Illustrations also gained critical acknowledgment after Blake's death more quickly than his prophetic books. As early as 1857 John Ruskin wrote of Blake in The Elements of Drawing that
The Book of Job, engraved by himself, is of the highest rank in certain characters of imagination and expression; in the mode of obtaining certain effects of light it will also prove a very useful example to you. In expressing conditions of glaring and flickering light, Blake is greater than Rembrandt.
The triple-mirror design in the background of plate 20, Job and his Daughters, is believed to have influenced William Holman Hunt's use of the same motif in his painting The Lady of Shalott; Blake was highly regarded by the Pre-Raphaelites.
Ralph Vaughan Williams based his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing (first staged in 1931) upon the Illustrations.
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The Lady of Shalott, 1905.
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Job and His Daughters, 1800.
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Plate 20 of the engravings.
Read more about this topic: William Blake's Illustrations Of The Book Of Job
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