Nebuchadnezzar (Blake) - History

History

Nebuchadnezzar was adapted from an earlier print in Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The plates for the Large Colour Prints and the first prints were made in 1795, but further impressions seem to have been printed in about 1805. In the late summer of 1805, Blake sold to Thomas Butts Jr. eight impressions of the Large Colour Prints, including the Tate Nebuchadnezzar, for £1.1 each.

John Clark Strange bought Butts's prints on 29 June 1853 and later acquired the rest of the collection that was sold to Henry George Bohn. Although he originally wanted to produce a biography on Blake, he later abandoned this idea after he learned of Gilchrist's biography. However, his journal was filled with his notes for the biography, and contain many accounts from those who knew Blake, excerpts from Blake's journal, and analysis of Blake's work. In his journal, he describes Nebuchadnezzar "crawling on his belly, naked covered with hair & nails grown long, eating grass.—'What was singular was that Blake's conception was almost a facsimile of an ancient German print of the same subject and which design Blake had never seen." Kenneth Clark identified the earlier image as a book illustration of a werewolf by Lucas Cranach the Elder, although a closer similarity is with the small figure of the saint in Albrecht Dürer's 1496 engraving The Penance of St. John Chrysostom.

• Detail of woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1512

• Detail of "The Penance of St. John Chrysostom", engraving, 1496