Urizen

William Blake

Monotype, with pen and brown and gray inks and watercolor on cream wove paper

Art Institute of Chicago

This work belongs to William Blake's richly developed mythological universe, in which Urizen personifies reason, law, and repressive order. Blake's invented cosmology, expressed across his "Prophetic Books" including The Book of Urizen (1794), casts Urizen as a god-like creator figure who, in measuring and bounding the material world, also ensnares humanity in webs of rational law and restricts the imaginative spirit. The Art Institute of Chicago holds a monotype of this subject — executed in pen and brown and gray inks and watercolor on cream wove paper — that exemplifies Blake's distinctive technique of combining printmaking with hand-applied color. Blake (1757–1827), a poet, painter, and engraver trained in the London tradition, developed his unique "illuminated printing" method to unite text and image in works of extraordinary visual and symbolic intensity.