Urizen leans from the sun and sets a compass on the dark

Crouched inside a blazing white-gold sun, a white-bearded god leans out through a bank of cloud and lowers a pair of compasses into the darkness below, the two golden legs of the instrument opening like a shaft of light. His hair and beard stream sideways in a wind that also drags the blue-grey and rose clouds across the disc behind him. This is Urizen — Blake's figure of reason and limitation — at the moment of setting a boundary to infinity, the frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy, printed and coloured by Blake himself in 1794. He is said to have worked on a version of it on his deathbed.

William Blake (1757–1827) was a London engraver, poet and visionary who claimed to have seen angels in a tree at Peckham Rye as a boy and never stopped drawing what he saw. Ignored in his lifetime and buried in an unmarked grave, he invented his own printing method, his own mythology and his own theology; a century later the Symbolists, the Surrealists and half of modern counter-culture claimed him as an ancestor.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.