Urizen

1794·Monotype, with pen and brown and gray inks and watercolor, on cream wove paper·17 × 12.7 cm (6 3/4 × 5 in.)

Although produced as an independent work, this unique hand-colored print is based on one of Blake’s plates from The Book of Urizen (published 1794), among the artist’s most complex printed books. In it, Blake’s invented mythology describes Urizen as “Creator of Men,” a god of immense power who invented a repressive web of laws and religion based on reason. For Blake, Urizen’s laws limited energy and crushed the imagination. Here, Blake depicts Urizen as a bearded old man crouching beneath a large rock, adhering closely to the following verses from The Book of Urizen: “And a roof, vast petrific around, / On all sides He fram’d: like a womb.”

Catalogue

Year: 1794
Medium: Monotype, with pen and brown and gray inks and watercolor, on cream wove paper
Dimensions: 17 × 12.7 cm (6 3/4 × 5 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: William Blake

Artist

William Blake

Painting

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".

Green Street

Full artist profile →

More by William Blake

View all →

Job and his Family

1828 · Line engraving on paper

WW-1828-163097