A horned dragon-king spreads his arms above a many-headed beast

A vast horned figure fills the sheet — the Great Red Dragon of Revelation, drawn as a muscular man with a ram's curling horns and a crown of small faces, his arms flung wide and his membranous wings sweeping to both edges of the page against a sky of streaming red-brown cloud scattered with pale stars. Below him, rising out of grey-green water, the Beast from the Sea lifts a cluster of seven horned heads, each with its own dull crown, mouths open. Blake painted the Revelation watercolours around 1805 for his patron Thomas Butts; this is the third of four, and the most frontal and heraldic of them.

William Blake (1757–1827) was a London engraver, poet and visionary who claimed to have seen angels in a tree at Peckham Rye as a boy and never stopped drawing what he saw. Ignored in his lifetime and buried in an unmarked grave, he invented his own printing method, his own mythology and his own theology; a century later the Symbolists, the Surrealists and half of modern counter-culture claimed him as an ancestor.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.