A Vision of the Last Judgment

Blake's monumental composition A Vision of the Last Judgment, executed in 1808, attempts to encapsulate his entire prophetic cosmology in a single tempera painting. Christ presides over a cosmos populated by Blake's own symbolic figures — not the Church's saints but his mythological beings Urizen, Los, and Albion — arranged in a teeming hierarchical vision of redemption and damnation. Blake worked on the composition for years, producing multiple versions, and wrote extensive commentary on the imagery. The work represents the most ambitious statement of his individualist theology: salvation through the creative imagination rather than institutional religion.

The densely populated composition arranges hundreds of figures in a vertical format ascending from Hell to Heaven. Blake's distinctive linear style, with its emphasis on contour over color, reflects his training as an engraver and his rejection of academic oil painting conventions.