Ezekiel's Wheels

Blake employed graphite to produce a rapid, gestural rendering, allowing the figures and surrounding vortex to emerge from energetic strokes. The drawing’s unfinished quality, with its rough contours and overlapping lines, creates a sense of immediacy and spiritual turbulence, characteristic of Blake’s broader practice of merging poetic imagination with visual experimentation.

Although Blake spent most of his life in London, he produced Ezekiel’s Wheels during a period of intense personal output. The work remained relatively obscure until after Blake’s death, when his reputation grew within Romantic circles. It entered the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s collection as part of a broader acquisition of Blake’s graphic oeuvre.

Ezekiel’s Wheels reflects this synthesis, embodying both devotional content and experimental draftsmanship.

Blake’s career straddled poetry and visual art, with a focus on symbolic, visionary subjects. In the early nineteenth century, his unconventional approach was largely unappreciated, yet his integration of biblical narrative and imaginative form anticipated later Romantic and Symbolist movements. Ezekiel’s Wheels reflects this synthesis, embodying both devotional content and experimental draftsmanship.