For the Sexes: the Gates of Paradise (Illuminated Manuscript with the Original Illustrations of William Blake‪)‬

 
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The Gates of Paradise, was first published in a limited run in 1793. In 1818 W. Blake changed the title to "For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise", and added several more drawings as well as a preface and concluding verses. The seventeen emblematic drawings and their commentaries depict the life of man from birth to death: passage through the four elements (water, earth, wind and fire), hatching as a child from the "mundane shell," encountering women, reaching for the moon of love ("I want, I want"), falling into Time's Ocean. After several other episodes he finally arrives at the death's door with Job's words: "I have said to the Worm: Thou art my mother and my sister." There a female figure is "Weaving to Dreams the Sexual strife, And Weeping over the Web of Life."

William Blake (1757 – 1827) was a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books.  Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th-century. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.