William Blake's Universe: 'conventional' and 'befuddling' artwork

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. 

Blake was undoubtedly "one of the greatest poets in the English language", said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Yet seen purely as an artist, he suffers by comparison with the other painters here – some of whose inclusion seems tenuous at best. Blake probably wasn't even aware of Runge and Friedrich, whose work here far outshines his own: the former fields an "exquisitely classical and totally psychotic" drawing of a possessed boy with "blank spheres" for eyes; while a series of "climactic" sepia drawings by Friedrich brim with wild, romantic imagery, from "the ruins of a monastery framed against the stark sky" to "skeletons in a cave swarming with stalactites". Blake, by contrast, seems rather conventional and outclassed.

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"At points, the exhibition seems wilfully befuddling and esoteric," said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Yet confusing as it can be, it succeeds in evoking the spirit of Blake's age. Like many of his contemporaries, he was "preoccupied by the French Revolution", and like some of them, he believed he was living through "the end times". This partially explains the "sense of apocalypse" that "saturates" his art, and may well have inspired some of the "sinister, manacled figures" and "celestial creatures wreathed in frames" that we see here. Blake still emerges as an "unclassifiable" original: his work is full of "inimitable, phantasmagorical images", from "coiled serpents and gigantic spiders scuttling across cobwebs" to "musclebound sylphs moving in sync, as if dancing the cha-cha-cha". For all its opacity, this is an admirable show that demonstrates "why its subject still matters". Indeed, "it makes Blake's profound oddness seem, if anything, even odder".

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk. Until 19 May