Job Rebuked by His Friends
1825
Medium
engraving on thick paper
Classification
Portfolio
Department
CG-E
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Rosenwald Collection
Accession Number
1943.3.1691
Art Historical Context
William Blake's *Job Rebuked by Friends* (1825) is a poignant engraving from his monumental series *Illustrations of the Book Job*, a set of 21 plates that distill the biblical tale of suffering, faith, and divine mystery. Depicting the moment when Job's companions—Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar—confront him amid his trials, the image captures the tension between human judgment and spiritual endurance. Blake, a visionary artist of the Romantic era, drew from his own watercolors created decades earlier, infusing the scene with dramatic contrasts of light and shadow to evoke profound emotional dept...
About the Artist
William Blake · 1757–1827
William Blake (1757–1827) stands as one of the most visionary and unconventional artists in British history, a poet-painter-printmaker whose mystical imagination and radical vision profoundly shaped the Romantic movement. Born in London's Soho district, Blake experienced visions from childhood—claiming to see angels in trees at age eight—and these spiritual encounters would guide his art throughou...