“And behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth”
— Revelations 12:3-4, King James Bible
The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun – buy the print
The Red Dragon Paintings are four watercolours by the English artist William Blake (1757 – 1827), painted between 1805 and 1809. It was during this period that Blake was commissioned to create over a hundred paintings intended to illustrate books of the Bible.
These paintings depict ‘The Great Red Dragon’ in various scenes from the Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament in which the Christian religion and the occult clash.
Blake’s visionary art illustrated other literary classics, including Milton’s Paradise Lost, The Gates of Paradise, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts.
William Blake – The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (Rev. 12: 1–4), ca. 1803–1805 – buy the print
“And the tail of the great red dragon drew the third part of the stars of heaven and did cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered for to devour her child as soon as it was born”
– Blake’s inscription on the watercolour The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun (above), 1803-1805, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA.
Portrait by Thomas Phillips (1807)
Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and Woman Clothed in the Sun illustrates the Bible passages that describe “an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads” who descends upon “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.”
The dragon embodies Satan on a mission is to exact revenge on the woman who has given birth to a follower of God who will spread the Christian faith. The US National Gallery of Art notes:
Sun bathes the woman’s figure and catches in the crescent sliver of moon on which she rests. Darkness and shadow fill the sky above like a storm cloud as the dragon’s wings stir a great wind and sweep her hair upward, flamelike. Below, a rising deluge invoked by the dragon–intended to engulf the woman—overwhelms the figures of hapless souls. As the devil hovers to witness her demise, God grants her wings that carry her to safety. Yet the powerful image of the dragon’s outstretched arms and hers arcing toward each other in mirror image suggest that good and evil are a duality, like the dark and light sides of the moon, rather than completely independent forces.
…I do not consider either the just, or the wicked, to be in a supreme state, but to be, every one of them, states of the sleep which the soul may fall into in its deadly dreams of good and evil, when it leaves Paradise following the serpent.
– William Blake, “A Vision of the Last Judgement”
The Number of the Beast is 666 – buy the print
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