William Blake · 1794

The Ancient of Days

Posters from $10.82 USD · Canvas from $28.14 USD

Ships anywhere in the USA

Blake's white-bearded Urizen kneeling on the edge of the sun, measuring the cosmos with a golden compass. The frontispiece to Blake's prophetic book Europe. British Museum.

Up to 11 × 14.9 in · portrait

Size

Larger sizes are unavailable for this painting because the source scan's resolution wouldn't print at gallery quality.

Format & finish

Archival cotton canvas stretched over a wooden frame. Ready to hang as-is. No external frame.

Scale next to a 5'10" person

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Hand-printed in our studio

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Materials & quality

›Canvas & inks

Giclée-printed on archival cotton canvas with fade-resistant pigment inks, hand-stretched over wooden bars. Gallery-wrapped — ready to hang with no extra frame needed.

›Floater frame

Hand-finished solid wood floater frame in five finishes. The canvas sits inside with a clean shadow gap — the way galleries hang contemporary canvas.

›Posters

Premium archival paper — 200 gsm soft matte or 230 gsm vibrant glossy. Ships flat or rolled, ready for your own frame.

›Faithful to the source

Printed from the highest-resolution museum and archive scans available. Each painting's maximum size is capped at what its source scan can support at gallery quality.

About this painting

The story of The Ancient of Days

An old man with streaming white hair crouches inside a disc of sun, one arm thrust down into the darkness, holding a pair of compasses open against the void. Blake made it in 1794 as the frontispiece to his book Europe a Prophecy, printing it from a copper plate and then coloring each copy by hand, so no two are alike. This one is in the British Museum. The figure is Urizen, Blake's god of limits and measurement, and the image cuts both ways: it is majestic, and it is also a picture of the universe being fenced in. Blake was still coloring a copy of it on his deathbed.

On a wall, this is a small, intense image built from three colors: the gold and orange of the sun, the deep red and black of the clouds, and the white of the figure. It glows against dark walls and holds its own on light ones. It suits a study, a library, a hallway, a music room, or a bedroom with a taste for the strange, and it fits gothic, academic, dark-academia, and eclectic interiors. We offer it in the Mini at 8 × 10.8 in and the Petite at 11 × 14.9 in; the Petite is the size to hang alone at eye level by a desk or a reading chair, and the Mini is a natural for a bookshelf.

Blake's The Great Red Dragon is the companion from the same visionary world, and Newton shows the same compasses in a scientist's hand. Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam is the other reaching god that Blake had in mind. More from William Blake.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the British Museum impression, so the hand-applied color and the printed line both come through.

About the artist

William Blake

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".

All William Blake prints →

Biography adapted from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Frequently asked

The Ancient of Days— questions & answers

›What does The Ancient of Days represent?

Created in 1794 as the frontispiece to Blake's prophetic book Europe, it shows Urizen — Blake's white-bearded embodiment of reason and law — kneeling on the edge of the sun, measuring the cosmos with a golden compass.

›Can I buy an Ancient of Days canvas print in the US?

Yes — Chromora prints The Ancient of Days on museum-quality archival cotton canvas, hand-finished in our studio and shipped anywhere in the USA. A single print over $100 USD ships free.

›Where is the original Ancient of Days?

This celebrated version is held at the British Museum in London.

Pairs well with