Jacob's Ladder

Blake's Jacob's Ladder depicts the Genesis vision in which Jacob, sleeping at Bethel, sees a ladder reaching from earth to heaven with angels ascending and descending. The image had been one of the most frequently illustrated Old Testament subjects since the medieval period, but Blake's version transforms it through his mature visual theology: the angels are muscular, dynamic figures whose movement between heaven and earth enacts the continuous spiritual commerce between realms that was central to his metaphysics. Blake identified more with the visionary experience of the Hebrew prophets than with systematic theology, and Jacob's dream became for him a model of the prophetic vision he claimed for himself.

Blake constructs the ladder as a steep diagonal cutting across the composition from lower right to upper left, the angels' bodies creating rhythmic accents along its length in varying poses of ascent and descent. His watercolor figures have the muscular definition of his engraver's eye for anatomical form, their wings adding geometric counterpoints to the human anatomy.