A muscular old man, his white hair and beard streaming sideways, crouches inside a blazing yellow disc and reaches down with one arm to hold a pair of golden dividers open over the darkness below. Red and purple clouds frame the disc, thin clouds veil its upper part, and rays of light fan down. A small number 1 is written at top right, inside the ruled border. William Blake made it as the frontispiece of Europe a Prophecy, a book he wrote, etched, printed and published himself in Lambeth in 1794.

The William Blake Archive identifies the figure as very probably Urizen, Blake's own mythic creator-god, creating or circumscribing the material universe; critics have also called the design God Creating the Universe. Blake printed the plate in relief etching and finished each impression by hand in color. He went on coloring it for years: the Whitworth in Manchester has an impression thought to be his last, colored, an early writer said, "when bolstered-up in his bed only a few days before he died." Ours comes from copy K, which Blake printed and colored around 1821 and sold to his friend John Linnell in August 1821, with another book, for £1. It is in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.