In 1779, when William Blake became a student at London’s Royal Academy, he immediately found himself at odds with the school’s president, Joshua Reynolds, who championed the pursuit of “general beauty” and loved fashionable painters like Rubens. Blake thought Reynolds’s approach was hypocritical. He instead chose to study the precision of the Renaissance masters Michelangelo and Raphael. Blake would go on to write immortal poems, but he continued to paint and make prints for the rest of his life. In 1827, in relative obscurity, he died, leaving behind a colossal body of work. Blake’s Romanticism is at the center of this exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which includes art by like-minded contemporaries such as Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. —Elena Clavarino