O Ancião dos Dias

Blake made this in 1794, with the French Revolution turning bloody just across the Channel and reform-minded Londoners like him under suspicion. It is the frontispiece to his book Europe a Prophecy, and the crouching figure reaching down with a compass is not God as most people would picture him. This is Urizen, Blake's own invention, the god of cold reason and law who measures out the universe and boxes it in. For Blake that measuring was the problem, the same rule-making spirit he saw in the Church and the state pressing down on ordinary life. He printed the design by hand from an etched plate and then coloured each copy with watercolour, so no two of the surviving impressions match. This was the image he loved most, and returned to copying again and again to the end of his life.