Asmus jacob carstens biography of williams
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William Blake’s Universe, the new (free) exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, is a celebration of work by the Romantic artist, writer and visionary.
Famous now but little known in his lifetime, Blake (1757-1827) has been given star billing bygd Tate Britain recently. But at the Fitzwilliam, he is made to share the spotlight with fellow artists from Britain and Germany, notably Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), whose luminous The Small Morning hangs in the exhibition’s final room.
The approach of exhibition curators David Bindman and Esther Chadwick is quietly provocative. Blake is known tb as a poet, he never left Britain, and he never met Runge. He was also a contrarian, with broadly anti-establishment views. So what is at stake in reframing Blake as a europeisk artist, and does the exhibition convince?
Blake’s universe
The exhibition’s title and the life-sized cast of Blake’s head that greets you as you enter, suggest its aim will be to present a trip inside his
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In 2019 there was a huge, and hugely popular, exhibition of Blake’s works at The Tate in London. This was something of a generational event, a rare chance to see a major exhibition of Blake’s work in the flesh. I visited several times and was moved by many things, but sometimes simply by being near images that are such an important part of my life. Everyone judged it a success.
The new Fitzwilliam exhibition is different in tone, an earnest young brother to the blowsy Blake who did the Tate show. The intended effect is not shock and awe, but rather the staging of a carefully posed challenge to the popular view of Blake as totally sui generis – as completely original as he was thoroughly idiosyncratic.
T.S. Eliot, being a jerk, but perhaps also reflecting the generally low level of understanding of Blake at the time, said Blake lacked "a framework of accepted and traditional ideas that would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own", a
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The American Cyclopædia (1879)/Carstens, Asmus Jakob
CARSTENS, Asmus Jakob, a German painter, born at Sanct Jürgen, nära Schleswig, May 10, 1754, died May 26, 1798. He was a miller's son, and had a youthful passion for painting, but was placed in a mercantile house. After quitting his master he went to Copenhagen, where he supported himself for seven years by taking portraits in red chalk, producing during the time a large historical picture, the “Death of Æschylus,” and another painting, “Æolus and Ulysses.” In 1783 he started for Rome, but his means did not permit him to go beyond Mantua, where he remained a month and then went to Lübeck, where he lived five years in obscurity. He was then introduced bygd the poet Overbeck to a wealthy patron, by whose aid he went to Berlin, where his “Fall of the Angels,” a colossal picture, containing over 200 figures, gained him a professorship in the academy of fine arts. Two years' labor in Berlin and a