About this work
*The Sun at His Eastern Gate* is among Blake's most inventive and beautiful illustrations for Milton's *L'Allegro*, showing a youthful god of the sun — an allegory for the poetic spirit — standing within a large mandorla of flame.
A central, radiant figure emerges from an ethereal gateway of light and energy, and surrounding him are various celestial beings in a state of exaltation and movement.
The smaller figures behind him may be read as clouds in their liveries, carrying platters of food that celebrate the sun's life-giving energy — though the outstretched arms of the sun and his sceptre also invoke the gates of heaven, with throngs of angels rejoicing all around. In the lower register, the scale shifts dramatically: beneath the blazing solar deity, small figures populate the pastoral world below — Milton walking by elms on hillocks green, a plowman, a milkmaid, a mower whetting his scythe, and a shepherd and his lass under a hawthorn in the dale.
The work is watercolour over graphite on paper, measuring just 6⅜ by 4¹³⁄₁₆ inches — an intimate scale that makes its visual ambition all the more astonishing.
In 1816, Thomas Butts is thought to have commissioned from Blake a series of illustrations for two poems by Milton — *L'Allegro* and *Il Penseroso* — which contrast the lively and gay temperament with the meditative and pensive one.
*The Sun at His Eastern Gate* is the third of six illustrations for *L'Allegro* specifically.
Blake engaged with the legacy of Milton all his life, and these watercolours, made around 1816–20, are considered some of the finest of all his works.
The artwork acts as a powerful allegory: it critiques Enlightenment rationalism, advocating instead for the power of imagination and spiritual experience.
The significance of portraying the sun — traditionally a symbol of Enlightenment — as a vulnerable, embodied human figure cuts to the heart of Blake's lifelong argument: that reason without imagination is tyranny, and that divine energy lives inside, not above, the human form.
The forms and environment are imbued with a sense of dynamism and fluidity characteristic of Blake's symbolic style, the composition blending human and abstract elements, with luminous colours and meticulous detailing enhancing its spiritual and mystical aura. On the wall, this piece rewards a room that can hold stillness — a study, a reading corner, a hallway where morning
