We tend to think of William Blake (1757-1827) as a quintessentially English kind of eccentric, said Nicholas Wroe in The Guardian. Thanks in part to his words for the hymn Jerusalem, the "idiosyncratic" poet and artist is remembered as a "determinedly Anglocentric" thinker: he never left England, and rarely strayed further afield than the boundaries of London. Yet, as the curators of this new exhibition at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum argue, Blake was perhaps not the isolated genius of legend. The show attempts to reframe its subject in the context of the wider artistic currents that swept across the continent during his lifetime, notably romanticism.
While Blake himself provides around half of the 180 paintings, drawings and prints on display, the rest come courtesy of his "peers, mentors and followers", said Katy Prickett on BBC News. William Blake's Universe features important works by his British contemporaries such as Samuel Palmer, and the German Romantic painters Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. As a whole, it promises to provide a fresh interpretation of Blake's "radical" vision.
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