William Blake was the emblem of Englishness – but his art was intrinsically European

Blake’s progress … Albion’s Angel Rose. Photograph: Katie Young/University of Cambridge, The Fitzwilliam Museum

The idea of William Blake as a figure representing an aspect of Britishness, or more specifically Englishness, is a well-established one. His poems – The Tyger, London and many others – are fixtures of school syllabuses; his brand of fervent spirituality casts him in a line of free-thinking visionary eccentrics (a view not harmed by his keenness for nudity and belief in the powers of sexual liberation); but most of all it is his words for the hymn Jerusalem that have cemented what has become a determinedly Anglocentric, if also idiosyncratic, reputation.

“Jerusalem as a kind of unofficial national anthem is the usual way into Blake,” says Esther Chadwick, co-curator with David Bindman of William Blake’s Universe, a new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. “But what we’re trying to do here is explicitly break him out of that nationally bound framework. Yes, he was a great English artist just as he was a great English poet, but despite the fact that during his lifetime he barely left London and never left England, he was also subject to wider European intellectual and creative currents.”

The show places Blake among contemporary artists working in Britain including Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman and Samuel Palmer, but also German Romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and particularly Philipp Otto Runge.

Jerusalem is the usual way into Blake. We want to break him out of that framework

Blake (1757-1827) and Runge (1777-1810) were near contemporaries, albeit with Blake in London and Runge 800 miles away on the Baltic coast in what was then Swedish Pomerania. But while they never met or communicated, they shared almost identical artistic educations, similar experiences of the tumultuous times in which they lived and formulated closely related artistic and spiritual responses.

The exhibition will feature 180 paintings, drawings and prints – more than half of which are by Blake – from the Fitzwilliam’s outstanding Blake holdings, which have recently been augmented by a significant bequest from the estate of John Maynard Keynes’s brother, the surgeon and collector Geoffrey.

The first section of the show examines the common threads of art teaching art across Europe. “What Blake was learning at the Royal Academy in London in terms of the study of classical antiquity, human anatomy through life classes, the Italian old masters, all would have been very legible to Runge studying in Copenhagen,” says Bindman. The second section focuses on artists’ responses to the seminal event of their age, the French Revolution, and the show concludes with the post-revolutionary period and Blake’s, and others, belief in the transcendental and redemptive nature of art and their quest for a renewed spirituality.

After the French Revolution’s assault on Christianity there was a spiritual revival in northern European countries, and to a degree in England, says Bindman. “That British revival is represented mainly by Blake and Palmer. But there was this sort of common endeavour between Romantic artists in Britain and Germany. They shared a belief that the arts should be used together, in the idea of a total mythology that incorporates all mythologies, and that their work might one day be displayed in vast temples or churches.”

“The quality of the work is exceptional,” says Chadwick. “But to see it together adds another dimension. Runge hasn’t often been shown in the UK and, despite some visual differences, here we have him and Blake simultaneously engaged on the most ambitious of undertakings; that art should play its part in the total regeneration of humankind, that in effect art could save the world.”

William Blake’s Universe is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Friday to 19 May.

Blake’s heaven: five works from the exhibition

Laocoön, 1826-27This engraving of the famous Hellenistic sculptural group was made at the very end of Blake’s life. He described this print as an expression of his creed, in that it distils his lifelong critique of commerce, empire and war with the searing statement to be found in the text around the image proclaiming: “where any view of money exists, Art cannot be carried on but war only”.

Europe a Prophecy, 1794

The title page of Blake’s illuminated manuscript of texts and images features the serpent of revolution about to strike. But it is not an unambiguous message and Blake captures a sense of energy and potential as much as danger and foreboding.

Glad Day, 1794–96Also known as Albion Rose, this is an image of both human and national redemption. Made at a time when Blake feared England was in the grip of convention and rationality, the figure, stripped of his clothing, has cast off the material world to awaken to a new dawn in a spirit of exultation.

Large Morning (Der grosse Morgen), 1808-09Runge was working on this painting at the same time as Blake was working on Jerusalem. It is a small fragment of a hugely ambitious, epic four-canvas work that would depict the soul, the awakening conscience and the progress of human life across Morning, Day, Evening and Night. The project was unfinished at the time of Runge’s early death, from tuberculosis aged just 33.

Albion’s Angel Rose Upon the Stone of Night, from Europe a Prophecy, 1794Blake claimed not to like caricature but here he satirises the pope – and in effect all organised religions – as a figure who had appropriated Christ’s true message of peace and equality for material gain and power, using the beauty of angels to disguise the brutality.