Back from the Brink

William Blake viewed his artistic practice as a form of opposition to various kinds of domination, and the repressive and oppressive effects of power (Davis 1977: 43). 

If ever there was a story of domination it is the story of Nebuchadnezzar, whose greatness reached to heaven and his sovereignty to the ends of the earth (Daniel 4:22). Yet Blake’s interest in and depiction of this oligarch is not of his dominance, but his humiliation. 

Despite Blake’s initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution, his opposition to the dominant forces of his own day was not primarily political. He had a spiritual aim in mind, one of cleansing the ‘doors of perception’ so that the material world (with its sensuality and rationality) could be seen, through imagination, as it ultimately is—infinite (Blake 1979: 188).

To achieve this aim, Blake believed it was necessary to creatively balance the complementary opposites within human beings and societies. This is the ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ about which he wrote. His belief in this balance was the ultimate impetus for his opposition to domineering forces, including the dominance of sensuality and reason, which were so antipathetic to imagination. 

It is the dominance of sensuality that Blake depicts in his hand-coloured print, Nebuchadnezzar. He based Nebuchadnezzar’s pose on Albrecht Dürer’s late fifteenth-century woodcut showing the medieval legend of the penance of St John Chrysostom. According to that story, the saint had himself succumbed to carnal and sensual temptation, and his chosen penance mirrored the degradation of Nebuchadnezzar (Wind 1937: 183). Blake likewise shows a human being who—by becoming a slave to sensuality—has reverted to the bestial: he is naked and on all fours with hair like feathers and nails like claws.

Nebuchadnezzar was part of Blake’s Twelve Large Colour Prints series in which, rather than there being an overarching narrative, the images seem to be linked by being paired with one another. His Nebuchadnezzar was paired with a Newton who represented the dominance of reason in eighteenth-century society, with its rational, scientific explanations for the world. Blake believed that both the rationalism and the sensuality he depicted in these two images repress the imagination. 

They serve as warnings which aim to open the doors of our perception.

References

Blake, William. 1979. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books)

Butlin, Martin. 1990. William Blake 1757–1827 (London: Tate Gallery Publications) 

Davis, Michael Justin. 1977. William Blake: A New Kind of Man (London: Elek)

Wind, Edgar. 1937. ‘The Saint as Monster’, Journal of the Warburg Institute 1.2: 183

William Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar was the initial inspiration for Australian artist Arthur Boyd’s series of Nebuchadnezzar paintings. Boyd viewed Nebuchadnezzar’s weakness as being his desire ‘to possess everything’ (Bungey 2000: 434). This may have reflected a degree of self-awareness in Boyd, for whom this series became an obsession as he sourced all the information he could on Nebuchadnezzar and ‘tore into the paint with a fury, his hands over the canvas like a concert pianist deprived too long of his grand piano’ (Bungey 2000: 426).  

Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream of the Tree is a calm work within this wild series. If Boyd’s expressionistic use of paint across the more than seventy paintings in the series mirrors the violence with which Nebuchadnezzar’s reason unravels, then this particular work modulates into a different emotional key as his reason returns. 

In the biblical text, Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a tree was the catalyst for his eventual descent into distress (Daniel 4:10–17). Daniel interpreted the Great Tree in the king’s dream as Nebuchadnezzar himself. Having grown too great in power and pride, he was to be driven away from people to live with the wild animals (Daniel 4:20–27). 

By setting the vision of the tree in the outback, however, Boyd relocates the dream to a point in the story after Nebuchadnezzar’s banishment to the wilderness, at the end of his distress. Nebuchadnezzar is shown as a semi-translucent, recumbent figure from whose groin the tree grows until it touches the line of the horizon. When, in his pride, Nebuchadnezzar created an image of gold, he required others to abase themselves on the ground before the image standing above them. Here, however, in a sign of new-found humility, it is Nebuchadnezzar himself who is on the ground. No longer in a position of dominance, he is the soil from which new life is growing.

The king is now ready to return to the seat of power with a new-found humility, giving a fertility and fruitfulness to the latter part of his reign. Australian musician Chris Latham, who directed Invocations: Eight meditations on paintings by Arthur Boyd at the National Gallery of Australia in 2014, notes that here ‘we have the archetypal “tree of life” growing out of Nebuchadnezzar's decrepit form, a deeply moving image of renewal, replenishment and rebirth’ (2014).

References

Bungey, Darleen. 2000. Arthur Boyd: A Life (Sydney: Allen & Unwin)

Latham, Chris. 2014. ‘Chris Latham's Invocations puts Arthur Boyd's National Gallery paintings to music, 24 October 2014’, www.smh.com.au [accessed 5 July 2019] 

In The Third Step, Peter Howson depicts a naked man dragging himself along the ground in a church graveyard. In the context of this virtual exhibition, Howson’s crawling figure can evoke Nebuchadnezzar in his distress because—to echo King Lear’s remark about the naked Edgar—the artist has here shown us a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ (King Lear 3.4.105–7). The man has been brought low having lost the accoutrements of civilization, and is looking up from his position among the gravestones towards the illuminated crucifix on the church tower.

Conversations with Howson have revealed that the artist identifies with this figure because, after being strung out on drugs and alcohol, he himself ‘finally recognized he had reached rock bottom and entered the addiction treatment centre at Castle Craig Hospital in the Scottish Borders’ (Kohan 2012: 76). While he was ‘following the twelve-step recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous he sensed the presence of Christ in his room one night, telling him he was loved and would be cured’. He had the same experience every night for the next three months. ‘Redemption had come to him in his private hell’ (Kohan 2012: 76). Howson’s minister, the Reverend Peter White, confirms that The Third Step ‘reflects [the artist’s] own recovery from his difficulties, made possible by his discovery of the love of Jesus’ (Fraser 2002).

John A. Kohan explains that The Third Step is a ‘reference to the stage in AA when addicts make a decision “to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God”’. Dark clouds ‘theatrically open to illuminate the crucifix on a nearby church tower’. ‘The burial ground becomes holy ground’ and the poor, bare, forked animal ‘drags himself into the zone of brightness like a contemporary Lazarus come forth from a pitted, concrete sepulchre’ (Kohan 2012: 76).  

Howson, this crawling figure, and Nebuchadnezzar all come to a moment of restorative realization about themselves and about God. In this painting Howson captures visually the internal moment when realization appears and, to quote William Blake, ‘the doors of perception’ become ‘cleansed’ (Blake 1979: 188).   

References

Blake, William. 1979. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books)

Heller, Robert. 2003. Peter Howson (London: Momentum Books)

Fraser, Steven. 2002. 'Howson sees the Light in the Kirk 3 March 2002', The Scotsman.

Kohan, John A. 2012. ‘Peter Howson and the Harrowing of Hell’, Image Journal, 76.