Virgin and Child

Blake's Virgin and Child occupies an ambiguous position in his visual theology — a subject he treated with genuine devotion while resisting the institutional Christianity that the subject conventionally reinforced. His Mary is never the placid Madonna of tradition but a figure of complex spiritual status within his mythological system, and his Christ children carry the prophetic energy of Eternal Humanity rather than the docile obedience of conventional piety. Blake's domestic religious imagery thus participates in a long pictorial tradition while subverting its theological content from within.

Blake's watercolor Virgin and Child combines the tender physical intimacy of the subject with his characteristic outline-dominated figure construction. His Mary tends toward a grave, luminous beauty — pale, softly lit — while the Christ Child's figure is handled with the muscular precision he brought to all his human forms regardless of age or gender.