Preludium II, America A Prophecy, by Blake

An image of Preludium II. America A Prophecy. Blake, William (British, 1757-1827). Relief etching, colour printing, hand colouring, watercolour, pen and ink on paper, height, plate, 235 mm, width, plate, 167 mm; height, sheet, 303 mm, width, sheet, 228 mm, 1793-1821. Production Note: The title-page is dated 1793 but the water-marks in the paper show that this copy was not executed before 1820. Framing line in red around the plate.

Terms of use

The low-resolution images published on this Website are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY-NC-ND). For more details: Fitzwilliam Terms of Use

This licence does not include any images of works that are still in copyright. Artistic copyright extends from the life of the artist to 70 years from the end of the calendar year in which the artist died.

Download this image

For further information on use of images or to license a high resolution version, please contact our image library who can discuss terms and fees.

Preludium II. America A Prophecy. Blake, William (British, 1757-1827). Relief etching, colour printing, hand colouring, watercolour, pen and ink on paper, height, plate, 235 mm, width, plate, 167 mm; height, sheet, 303 mm, width, sheet, 228 mm, 1793-1821. Production Note: The title-page is dated 1793 but the water-marks in the paper show that this copy was not executed before 1820. Framing line in red around the plate.

Image data

Accession Number: P.127-1950(4)
Photograph copyright © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Aperture: f/19.0
Focal length: 120
Camera: Hasselblad H4D-31
Photographer name: Michael Jones
Image height: 1025 pixels
Image width: 740 pixels
Processed with: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.0 (Windows)
Filesize: 974.73kB
Exposure time: 1/125
ISO Speed: 100
Fnumber: 19/1
Captured: 2014:04:16 15:04:39

Key words

19th Century America Blake book British School colour printing emerges emerging etching Fitz_PDP hand coloured handwriting handwritten illustration literature male nude narrative nude poem poetry poets preludium print prophecy prophetic Romanticism texts verses vision visionary watercolour William Blake writing

Citation for print

This page can be cited in the Harvard Bibliographic style using the text below:


            The Fitzwilliam Museum (2026)
            "Preludium II, America A Prophecy, by Blake"
            Web page available at: https://collection.beta.fitz.ms/id/image/media-218261 Accessed: 2026-01-11 11:10:51

Citation for Wikipedia

To cite this page on Wikipedia you can use this code snippet:


            {{cite web|url=https://collection.beta.fitz.ms/id/image/media-218261
            |title=Preludium II, America A Prophecy, by Blake
            |author=The Fitzwilliam Museum|accessdate=2026-01-11 11:10:51|publisher=The
            University of Cambridge}}

API call for this record

To call these data via our API (remember this needs to be authenticated) you can use this code snippet:

https://collection.beta.fitz.ms/api/v1/images/media-218261

Bootstrap HTML code for reuse

To use this as a simple code embed, copy this string:

<div class="text-center">
    <figure class="figure">
        <img src="https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/imagestore/pdp/pdp82/p_127_1950_284_29_201404_mfj22_dc2.jpg"
        alt="Preludium II"
        class="img-fluid" />
        <figcaption class="figure-caption text-info">Preludium II, America A Prophecy, by Blake</figcaption>
    </figure>
</div>