The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun

A biblical painting for Blake’s main patron, Thomas Butts, which represents a sequence from the book of Revelations. The woman and the dragon are roughly equivalent in size, suggesting a correspondence and relationship between them. Blake frequently used different states of being to satirize others most famously in his poetry collection ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience,’ wherein the naivety of the narrator in the first part contrasts with their cynicism concerning similar subjects in the second. In this image of the struggle between good and evil, each is reconfigured as flowing out from and fighting against the other, even though Blake ultimately believed that the positive, creative, and spiritual aspects of humanity would defeat the savage, devouring instincts represented by the dragon.