Angel of the Revelation (Book of Revelation, chapter 10)

Blake painted this watercolour for Thomas Butts around 1803 to 1805, one of a series of Bible subjects, and it is the tenth chapter of the Apocalypse in a single figure. A colossal angel stands astride the world, his right foot in the sea and his left on the land, one arm flung straight up to heaven and the other holding a small open book against his thigh. Behind his head the sky burns like a sunrise. In the cloud at his knees, tiny, seven horsemen ride; and at his feet, smaller still, a man sits on a rock with a book open on his knee, writing. That man is John.

The chapter describes the angel in two verses and Blake follows both. I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud; a rainbow was on his head, and his face as the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire. He had in his hand a little book, open; and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot upon the earth. The cloud is his garment, the rainbow is in the arc of colour round the light, his feet stand in flame at the water's edge, and the little book is in his left hand. Blake gives him no wings, which is why the mark on this record explains itself: the figure is filed under the Angel and the Wing for what he is. He lifts his hand to heaven because the fifth verse says he did, to swear by him that liveth for ever that time shall be no longer.

His face as the sun. Blake does not paint a sun; he paints the sun's light pouring from behind the angel's head across the whole upper half of the sheet, orange into gold into white, so that the angel is the source of the daylight in the picture. The archive files the light under the Sun and the Moon because the text names the sun, and because the whole colour of the painting depends on it.

The seven horsemen in the cloud are Blake's invention on the text's cue. When the angel cried with a loud voice, seven thunders uttered their voices, and John was about to write what they said when a voice from heaven told him to seal it up and write it not. Blake makes the thunders riders, galloping in the cloud round the angel's knees, an army of the unspoken. The archive records them as his, since the text gives them voices and not horses, and files them under the Heavens as the powers of the sky that they are.

The small figure at the bottom is the key to the scale. John sits on Patmos with his book, looking up, and the angel towers over him like a lighthouse over a boat. Blake's picture is about the size of a vision compared with the man who has to write it down, and about the book in the angel's hand that the man at his feet is copying. A few verses on, which Blake does not paint, the angel gives John the book to eat. This is the moment before.