Ezekiel's Wheels

Some years before he made this sheet, Blake wrote that the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel had dined with him. The scene is in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, his satirical book of the early 1790s, where he asks Ezekiel why he ate dung and lay so long on his right and left side, and the prophet answers that he did it out of the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite. Here Blake turns to the opening of Ezekiel's own book. By the river Chebar, among the exiles in Babylonia, the priest sees a whirlwind come out of the north, a great cloud with fire folded inside it, and in it four living creatures, each with four faces and four wings, beside wheels that run as a wheel within a wheel, their rims full of eyes. The museum's title follows the text, the whirlwind, the cherubim and the eyed wheels. Blake worked it in pen, ink and watercolour over pencil around 1803 to 1805, one of a long series of Bible subjects.