William Blake's Universe

A unique look into Blake's past, present and future artistic conceptions.

Against a backdrop of revolution and war in Europe, enslavement and exploitation in European colonies, and repression and reaction at home in Britain, William Blake (1757-1827) produced an astonishing body of work that combined criticism of the contemporary world with a vision for universal redemption. This exhibition, the first to showcase the full Blake holdings of the Fitzwilliam Museum and the treasures of the Geoffrey Keynes Bequest, explores the vital ingredients of his art, from his classical training at the Royal Academy and his immersion in the art of antiquity and the Renaissance to his fascination with early modern mystical imagery. It argues for Blake as a truly European figure, despite the fact that, paradoxically, he never left Britain's shores. Blake was not alone in looking to art to build the world anew in the face of shattering political crises. The exhibition compares Blake with his younger contemporary in Germany, Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), who likewise sought to visualise the spiritual renewal of mankind in novel artistic form. Blake's depictions of the spiritual journey of the soul from fallenness to redemption are brought into conversation with the work of a range of contemporaries, including Caspar David Friedrich and Samuel Palmer, in order to highlight tensions between individual, national and universal liberation in the decades around 1800.

Blake has always been seen as a distinctively English figure. He never travelled abroad, he constructed a national myth based on the figure of Albion, who is both an everyman and the nation, and he is the author of the poem 'Jerusalem', which has become an alternative national anthem. But in reality his art at all periods of his career is profoundly involved with Europe, as a source of his art and as a vision of the past, present and future of humanity. The idea of a 'European Blake' is not new. It was first raised in the Blake exhibition held at the Hamburg Kunsthalle and the St.del Museum in Frankfurt in 1975, as part of the landmark series Kunst um 1800, devised by the director of the former, Werner Hofmann. There Blake was presented as one of a constellation of Northern artists who sought to reinvent art at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This exhibition builds on the legacy of Kunst um 1800 by exploring Blake's relationship to Italy, France and Germany and his artistic conceptions of past, present and future.