William Blake · c.1805–10

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun

Posters from $10.82 USD · Canvas from $28.14 USD

Ships anywhere in the USA

Blake's apocalyptic dragon from Revelation rearing over a small kneeling woman whose body is haloed by the sun. Brooklyn Museum.

Up to 8 × 10.1 in · portrait

Size

Larger sizes are unavailable for this painting because the source scan's resolution wouldn't print at gallery quality.

Format & finish

Archival cotton canvas stretched over a wooden frame. Ready to hang as-is. No external frame.

Scale next to a 5'10" person

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Hand-printed in our studio

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Materials & quality

›Canvas & inks

Giclée-printed on archival cotton canvas with fade-resistant pigment inks, hand-stretched over wooden bars. Gallery-wrapped — ready to hang with no extra frame needed.

›Floater frame

Hand-finished solid wood floater frame in five finishes. The canvas sits inside with a clean shadow gap — the way galleries hang contemporary canvas.

›Posters

Premium archival paper — 200 gsm soft matte or 230 gsm vibrant glossy. Ships flat or rolled, ready for your own frame.

›Faithful to the source

Printed from the highest-resolution museum and archive scans available. Each painting's maximum size is capped at what its source scan can support at gallery quality.

About this painting

The story of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun

A winged beast with a man's back and a serpent's tail hangs in the air, arms spread, over a small woman whose whole body glows like a lamp. Blake painted the scene from the Book of Revelation in watercolor sometime between 1805 and 1810, one of four versions he made, and this one belongs to the Brooklyn Museum. It has had a second life in thrillers and album covers, but the original is stranger and more tender than any of that. The dragon is drawn from behind, so you share his view of the woman, and that is what makes it uncomfortable.

The colors are muted: rust, ochre, gray-violet, and the pale gold of the woman's halo against a dim sky. It is a vertical image that carries a lot of feeling in a small area, which is why we offer it only at the Mini, 8 × 10.1 in. That is not a compromise. This is a piece for a desk, a bookshelf, a reading nook, or a tight gallery-wall cluster of prints, where a viewer stands close enough to see the pencil under the wash. It suits dark studies, moody bedrooms, and anyone who likes their walls to have a little menace.

Pair it with Blake's own The Ancient of Days, the compass-wielding creator that is its calm opposite, or with Newton for a trio of Blake's visionary figures. Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son is the other painting people put next to this one when they want a wall that unsettles. More from William Blake.

We print from a public-domain photograph of the Brooklyn Museum watercolor, so the paper texture and Blake's faint pencil lines come through on the canvas.

About the artist

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake has become a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his "prophetic works" were said by the 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "human existence itself".

All William Blake prints →

Biography adapted from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Frequently asked

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun— questions & answers

›What is The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun about?

Part of Blake's Great Red Dragon series (c.1805–10) illustrating the Book of Revelation: the many-headed dragon rears over a small kneeling woman whose body is haloed by the sun — apocalyptic menace against radiant innocence.

›Where can I buy a Great Red Dragon canvas print?

Chromora prints The Great Red Dragon on museum-quality archival cotton canvas, hand-finished in our studio and shipped anywhere in the USA. Prints over $100 USD ship free.

›Where is this Great Red Dragon painting?

This version from the series is held at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

Pairs well with