The paintings, according to the only critic who bothered to review the show, were wretched and the artist suffered from “the wild effusions of a distempered brain”. Thus ended William Blake’s one shot at fame and glory in his lifetime, a solo exhibition in his brother’s Soho hosiery shop.

Now the 1809 show is to be restaged at Tate Britain, reuniting at least nine of the surviving works (five have been lost) by the visionary poet, painter and printmaker. Today Blake is regarded as one of the greatest of British artists but his contemporaries, with few exceptions, either ignored him or dismissed him as a madman.

In 1809 he was 52 and had already completed the majority of the Illuminated Books for which he is best remembered today, among them Songs of Innocence and of Experience (which includes the poem The Tyger) and Milton: A Poem (which includes what is now known as Jerusalem).

However, according to Martin Myrone, the curator of Tate Britain’s exhibition, he was seen primarily as a “lowly commercial engraver of other people’s work” and the original works now regarded as masterpieces were “known only to a very few people”.

Times Archive, 1913: William Blake at the Tate gallery

Blake regarded it as his duty to translate his visions into line and colour for the enlightenment of the world

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“He had exhibited a few individual works at the Royal Academy but never earned the reputation that he wanted as a painter. This show in 1809 was his big attempt to do that,” Mr Myrone said. “What’s very striking is that the public and the critics took no interest. It shows how misunderstood Blake was in his own day and provides a lesson in how tastes can change.”

Blake’s strong images and boldly original subject matter, reaching deep into his own imagination, look strikingly modern when set against his much more successful peers, Constable and Turner. Even on a technical level, contemporaries grossly underestimated him, Mr Myrone said.

Blake died on August 12, 1827, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the dissenters’ graveyard at Bunhill Fields, East London.

The nine works lined up for the show include several from the Tate Collection along with loans from the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert, the Fitzwilliam and Southamp-ton Art Gallery. They have not been exhibited together for almost 200 years. The original display was held in Golden Square in Soho from April 1809 through to the spring of 1810.

The 2009 display will also include a number of related works by Blake, and more conventional paintings in oils and watercolours exhibited in other exhibitions in London in 1809.

The display is part of the BP British Art Display and is free. It opens on April 20 and will run until October 4.

Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring, now a 20th century classic, had a spectacular world premiere. The audience in Paris in 1913 were so shocked by the primitive movements of the dancers and jerky rhythms of the music that they rioted

Impressionism took its name from a review by Louis Leroy of Claude Monet’s Impression: soleil levant. Leroy, writing in Le Charivari on April 25, 1874, called Monet an “impressionist” and went on: “A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.”

Harold Pinter’s first London play The Birthday Party opened on May 19, 1958. The reviews were so savage that the play closed after a week and the future Nobel laureate had to be talked out of giving up writing by his wife. The thoughts of W. A. Darlington in The Daily Telegraph were typical. Sympathising with the character of a depressed deckchair attendant, he wrote: “ I can give him one word of cheer. He might have been a dramatic critic, condemned to sit through plays like this." Extract from the only review of the exhibition: from an essay in The Examiner (September 17, 1809) by Robert Hunt representation and the whole blotted and blurred and very badly drawn. These he calls an exhibition, of which he has published a catalogue, or rather a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain.”

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