- Artist
- William Blake
- Year
- 1794
- Medium
- Relief etching with watercolor
William Blake’s The Ancient of Days serves as the frontispiece to his illuminated book Europe a Prophecy of 1794. It shows Urizen, Blake’s embodiment of reason and limitation, kneeling within a blazing sun-disc and leaning down from the clouds to set his great compass upon the void. The image, which Blake himself valued above all his works, fuses his personal mythology with the tradition of God as the divine architect, and it is among the most reproduced of all his designs.