Nebuchadnezzar — William Blake, 1795

The King Brought Low

In Nebuchadnezzar (1795), William Blake depicts the mighty Babylonian king at his most abject — crawling on all fours, his great body reduced to animal form, his mind shattered by divine punishment. It is one of Blake's most viscerally powerful images: a meditation on pride, madness, and the terrifying distance between human ambition and human fragility.

Blake renders Nebuchadnezzar not with contempt but with a strange, anguished empathy — the king's muscular form still magnificent even in its degradation, his eyes wild with a suffering that transcends the biblical narrative. This is Blake at his most visionary: myth made flesh, punishment made poetry.

About William Blake

William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker whose visionary imagination placed him entirely outside the conventions of his time. Working in a private symbolic universe of angels, demons, and prophetic figures, he created some of the most original and haunting images in the history of Western art. His influence on Romanticism, Symbolism, and beyond is immeasurable.

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