The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides

Blake's The Wood of the Self-Murderers derives from Dante's Inferno, Canto XIII, depicting the souls of suicides transformed into trees, tormented by Harpies. Blake executed this tempera in 1824 as part of his late campaign of Dante illustrations commissioned by John Linnell — one of over one hundred drawings left incomplete at Blake's death in 1827. Blake's Dante project occupied his final years with the intensity of a summative work, allowing him to engage with the Italian poet's moral cosmology while asserting his own contrary theology. The painting demonstrates Blake's late mastery of flame-like figuration and symbolic color.

Blake's distinctive linear style creates a nightmarish forest of twisted, anthropomorphic trees with suffering human faces. The limited palette of dark browns and muted greens, punctuated by the Harpies' forms, creates a claustrophobic atmosphere of perpetual torment.