Henry Fuseli

Born Zurich, 6 Feb 1741; died Putney Hill, nr London, 16 April 1825.

Painter, draughtsman and writer, active in England, son of Johann Caspar Füssli. He spent most of his working life in England, where he established himself as the most original history painter and draughtsman of his generation. Renowned for his treatment of bizarre and psychologically penetrating subjects, he was also a prolific writer and, from 1779, Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy.

1. Life and work.

Fuseli received rigorous art-historical training from his father, becoming acquainted with the Neo-classical ideas of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Anton Raphael Mengs: his godfather was the poet and artist Salomon Gessner. The Anglophile scholars Johann Jacob Bodmer and Johann Jacob Breitinger introduced him to Classical philology and to Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton and the Nibelungenlied. This training impressed upon Fuseli the affinity of painting and poetry and the power of poetic imagery in defining human experience.

Although Fuseli started to draw when he was eight, copying engravings in his father’s collection, he was ordained into the Zwinglian ministry in 1761. However, the following year he and his close friends Johann Kaspar Lavater and Felix Hess published an attack on a corrupt Zurich magistrate. As a result, they were unofficially advised to leave the city for a while, and in 1763 they toured Germany. They visited the mathematician and art theorist Johann Georg Sulzer in Berlin, the Protestant theologian Johann Joachim Spalding in Barth, Pomerania, and the poet Friedrich Klopstock at Quedlinburg. Fuseli returned to Berlin that year to assist Sulzer with his Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste.

At this time Fuseli’s interests were primarily in literature and moral philosophy, and when he visited London in 1764 it was chiefly to explore English literature and to forge links between English and German writers. He travelled with the English chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Sir Andrew Mitchell, through whom he met the publisher Joseph Johnson (1738–1809) and made many influential friends in his circle. In London Fuseli began to take a serious interest in art and was drawn to literary and theatrical life, particularly David Garrick’s performances. Encouraged to become a painter by Joshua Reynolds, whom he met in 1767 or 1768, Fuseli finally abandoned theology and philosophy, though never literature. He had been making drawings sporadically since boyhood and had produced illustrations for Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle (1769) and Dr Willoughby’s Practical Family Bible (1766–70), but his greater ambitions drove him to Rome in 1770 to devote himself to high art.

Fuseli reached Rome, via Genoa and Florence, at the end of May. His eight-year stay was broken only by visits to Venice in 1772, to recuperate from fever, and to Naples in 1775. Although brought up on Winckelmann’s idealization of Greek art and condemnation of Michelangelo, Fuseli found himself overwhelmed not only by the grandeur and scale of Roman sculptures—as expressed in his powerful drawing of The Artist in Despair over the Magnitude of Antique Fragments (the Right Hand and Left Foot of the Colossus of Constantine) (c. 1778–80; Zurich, Ksthaus)—but also by the heroic drama of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes. Rejecting the excessively pure archaism of Winckelmann and Mengs, Fuseli developed his own fusion of the linear and compositional discipline of Roman relief sculpture with the more dramatically expressive rendering of the human form achieved by Michelangelo and such Mannerist artists as Parmigianino and Rosso Fiorentino. Fuseli’s art was concerned uniquely with the human figure seen in tragic or violent situations drawn from Aeschylus, Homer, Dante and especially Shakespeare (e.g. The King of Denmark is Poisoned by his Brother while Sleeping, 1771; Zurich, Graph. Samml. Eidgenöss. Tech. Hochsch.). His choice of subjects, dramatic composition and rapidly developing mastery of stylized form soon made him the most original artist then working in Rome and the focus of an international circle of followers and friends, including Johann Tobias Sergel, Nicolai Abildgaard, John and Alexander Runciman, Thomas Banks, George Romney, James Barry and James Northcote. His reputation spread beyond Italy, and his literary friends in Germany acclaimed his work as the visual counterpart of their own Sturm und Drang movement.

Henry Fuseli: The Nightmare, oil on canvas, 755×65 mm, 1790…In 1778 Fuseli returned to Zurich, where he began painting an episode from Swiss history, the Oath of the Rütli (completed 1780), for the Rathaus. This was based on a drawing executed in his last days in Rome. Although reunited with Lavater and other old friends in Zurich, he was bitterly nostalgic for Rome and torn between emotional attachments to Magdalena Hess and to Lavater’s niece Anna Landolt. The rejection of his suit by Anna’s father so upset him that he returned to London in 1779, where he rejoined his old friends around Joseph Johnson and widened his circle to include the bankers Thomas Coutts (1735–1822) and William Roscoe of Liverpool and William Lock (1732–1810) of Norbury, all of whom were to become important patrons. From this period he styled himself Fuseli and dedicated himself to history painting on a grand scale, transferring to canvas the bold and disturbing imagery and massive, heroic abstraction of his Roman drawings. His deficient technique provoked hostile reactions at first, but in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1781 he had his first great success with The Nightmare (Detroit, MI, Inst. A.), a remarkable evocation of a mood and moment of terror in a rhythmic composition that is also dependent on motifs from Hellenistic sculpture. This picture—perhaps an attempt to exorcise Fuseli’s bitterness against Anna Landolt by punishing her with a dream—was to be followed a decade later by a more distanced and rational reworking of the theme, in which the symptoms of disturbed sleep were given almost clinical description (Weimar, Goethe-Nmus. Frauenplan and Frankfurt am Main, Goethemus.; see fig.).

Shakespeare’s plays continued to provide subjects for Fuseli in major pictures including the Three Witches (1783; Stratford-upon-Avon, Royal Shakespeare Mus.) and Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking (1784; Paris, Louvre). These established beyond doubt his claim to rank alongside Reynolds and Benjamin West as a history painter and to surpass them in emotional force to the extent that his work appeared antithetical to their sober classicism. They also assured his position as one of the originators, and possibly a proposer while still in Rome, of John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. Up to the first exhibition of the Gallery in 1789, most of Fuseli’s energies were devoted to this project. The critical success of his pictures contributed largely to his reputation and to his election as Associate of the Royal Academy in 1788 and full Academician in 1790, despite the opposition of Reynolds. Fuseli’s contributions to the Shakespeare Gallery were the most numerous and indeed, including work such as Titania and Bottom (completed 1790; London, Tate), the most original; despite this he initially received less for his paintings than Reynolds, West or James Barry.

This lack of financial recompense and a resentment that Boydell was more concerned with profit than the promotion of history painting prompted Fuseli to venture a scheme over which he could retain total control. In 1790 he began his own Milton Gallery, working against a stormy emotional background. In 1788 he had married Sophia Rawlins, who had been an amateur artist’s model and would often feature in his work. The following year, however, he met the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, a friend of William Blake, whom Fuseli had known and admired since c. 1787. Her infatuation with Fuseli led her in 1792 to propose that the three of them go to Paris to witness the Revolution, but this suggestion was dropped when Fuseli’s wife put a stop to the association. He meanwhile persuaded his friends, including Coutts, Lock, Johnson and Roscoe, to underwrite the Milton Gallery by regular subscription, thus providing an annual income while work progressed on such pictures as the Creation of Eve (1793; Hamburg, Ksthalle). The exhibitions of the 47 paintings in 1799 and 1800 were not, however, an unqualified success, and the second had to be promoted by an Academy banquet in Fuseli’s honour. Print sales did not redeem the time expended on the large paintings, and once again Fuseli gained more respect than remuneration. In the end his Milton Gallery was a heroic and instructive failure, admired by Fuseli’s colleagues but rejected by the public.

Both the Shakespeare and Milton subjects gave rein to Fuseli’s interests in the supernatural, fairy mythology and demonic superstition—concerns that matched the trend of contemporary thought, which was moving away from the rational scepticism of the Enlightenment. While the two large projects occupied most of his attention up to 1800, he also found time for other themes that gave scope for his obsessions. Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent (1788; London, RA) was the forerunner of a series of paintings and drawings illustrating Nordic poets and legends, while Dante was another favourite source. Throughout his career Fuseli also produced countless images of women, from portraits of his wife and other models wearing the latest fashions of clothes or hairstyles to erotic and disturbing depictions of courtesans and femmes fatales (e.g. Symplegma, 1809–10; London, V&A; see also ).

In 1799 Fuseli was elected the Academy’s Professor of Painting, a post he held until 1805; he was made Keeper in 1804. He was re-elected Professor in 1810, and the statutes were changed to enable him to retain the Keepership as well. Real financial security came to him only at this time. His regime at the Academy was liberal and eccentric, but his eye for talent was unerring, and his pupils included most of the leading names of the next generation, notably John Constable, Edwin Landseer, William Mulready, Charles Robert Leslie and Benjamin Robert Haydon. By 1814 Haydon had turned against Fuseli, offended by his irreverent ideas and by his failure to recognize the worth of the Elgin marbles. The last quarter of Fuseli’s life was occupied largely with writing, teaching and formulating his art-historical ideas. In 1802, during the brief Peace of Amiens, he visited Paris with Joseph Farington to see the Musée Napoleon, and in the following years he published extensively. His later paintings were often reworkings of earlier themes but became more dramatic and mysterious than ever through a bolder and more painterly execution, as in the transparent paintwork of Garrick and Mrs Pritchard in Macbeth (1812; London, Tate). He died at the country home of his friend, the Countess of Guildford, and was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, London.

2. Working methods and technique.

Throughout his career Fuseli maintained an extremely practical and professional approach to his art that can seem at odds with its wayward subject-matter. In his earliest days he took pains to demonstrate his versatility as an illustrator and portrait painter as well as a historical painter; in later years he was among the first London artists to exhibit in the provinces. In addition he was always anxious to oversee, and secure an adequate return from, the reproduction of his work through prints. An early massacre of Fuseli’s illustrations for the French edition of Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente (1781–6) put him on his guard against incompetent reproductive engravers, and he was happy to secure some help from Blake, who had worked for Johnson since 1779. But Blake was too much immersed in projects of his own to give the unstinting personal service Fuseli thought desirable, and Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery had proved clearly that in most cases it was the publisher, not the original artist, who reaped the profits from reproductive prints. This explains in part Fuseli’s concern to retain complete control of his own Milton Gallery, as well as his appointment in 1803 of Moses Haughton as his personal engraver, boarding and employing him until 1819 to engrave and publish his work and keeping a fair share of the proceeds for himself.

From the outset Fuseli’s art proceeded from drawings, and most of its formal, tonal and iconographical characteristics were first worked out on paper. He had no academic or conventional training as a painter and was in effect self-taught; many of his canvases have deteriorated badly as a result of faulty or experimental techniques. Even early drawings such as Lear and the Dead Cordelia (1774; Zurich, Ksthaus) establish the key features of his art: the setting of monumental figures—whose extremely expressive attitudes are defined by tense linear strokes of pen or chalk—against vague, receding darkness washed in grey or purple. The same presentation of figures against void and shadow occurs constantly in his paintings, where the literal definition of space is of no concern. However, his use of chiaroscuro was not exclusive; he claimed he had courted colour all his life as a despairing lover would a disdainful mistress. Pale muted tones are often contrasted with passages of vivid local tint to produce a sparkling effect. His painting technique did not change materially until after c. 1810, when it became much broader and more impressionistic.

Fuseli’s drawing styles meanwhile had diversified, ranging from sharp essays in pen and ink, with or without his characteristic washes of greys, mauves and ochres, to softer and more subtly modulated use of unaccompanied pencil or black chalk. His later drawings tend to be more suggestive than assertive and achieve an almost ghostly effect, in contrast to the vigorous linearity of earlier work. These technical changes in both drawings and paintings accompanied developments in his approach to composition. The highly wrought and strained schemes of his Roman and post-Roman phases gave way in the 1790s to simpler and perhaps more consciously classical arrangements that suggest analogies with antique reliefs and John Flaxman’s line engravings. These patterns in turn yield to more shadowed—and sometimes nocturnal—groupings, in which outline is cloaked by tone.

3. Writings and lectures.

Fuseli’s writings, which include poetry, translation, journalism, theory and history, in retrospect appear scarcely less influential than his art. His earliest publications, an English translation (1765) of Winckelmann’s Reflections on the Paintings and Sculptures of the Greeks and Remarks on the Writings and Conduct of J.-J. Rousseau (1767; the first unfavourably reviewed and the second largely ignored), are based on initial enthusiasms that he later qualified. Fuseli also worked in London on a History of German Poetry in 1769 (MS. destr. 1770), but suspended literary activities while in Rome. On his return to England he reviewed books and Academy exhibitions in Johnson’s Analytical Review (with no hesitations about praising his own work). He also continued to translate, producing a free rendering of Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man in 1788 and contributing to Johnson’s edition of his friend’s Physiognomische Fragmente (1792).

Fuseli’s reviews are significant barometers of his own thinking. Writing of Murphy’s Tacitus in 1793, he revealed a change of heart over the French Revolution, having, like most moderate intellectuals, been turned against it by the Terror. Although he rejected his early enthusiasm for Rousseau’s ideas as Utopian, Fuseli adopted his belief that art is both the product of, and a threat to, corrupt society. Yet far from rejecting art, Fuseli proceeded to the more radical conclusion that art and morality were distinct, an idea that underpinned the amoral and exceptional character of his own work. In a review of the Rev. R. A. Bromley’s Philosophical and Critical History of the Fine Arts (1793) he uncompromisingly stated that the ‘moral usefulness’ of the arts ‘is at best accidental and negative’ (Analytical Review, xvi (1793), pp. 242–3). Thus he saw nothing blasphemous in making Satan the real hero of his Milton series, presenting him as a rebellious figure with whom he could identify as an artist, while his lack of specific faith by this stage of his life (or perhaps a residual puritanism) made him reluctant to depict God except on his own secular terms.

Discussing Reynolds’s last Discourse (1791), Fuseli challenged his fellow painter’s theory of imitation with the view that, while only a mind equal to Michelangelo’s could profit by copying him, such a mind would never ‘condescend’ to do so. However, he shared Reynolds’s opinion that artistic excellence was only to be acquired through study and selection from nature, thus differing from Blake, who believed the artist should look beyond the visible world and seek out genius in his own innate ideas. Although Fuseli declared Blake ‘damned good to steal from’, he was not sympathetic to the visionary side of Blake’s art, believing that it displayed more of ‘fancy’ than true ‘imagination’. Historians have tended to exaggerate the proximity of the two artists: nevertheless Fuseli was prepared to support the publication of Blake’s designs and in 1796 contributed an unsigned introduction to Blake’s edition of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts.

Fuseli’s ultimately classicist ideas on artistic education crystallized in his Academy lectures, begun in 1801. These were splendidly unprejudiced and never promoted the character or claims of his own art; indeed his dismissal of personal eccentricities, his condemnation of violent or frightening themes and his attacks on the Italian Mannerists are strongly at variance with it. His belief in excellence through selection from nature and in the absolute superiority of classical art, followed in the hierarchy by Roman and Florentine painting, were essentially unoriginal. More interesting are his asides on the history of art and on his contemporaries, which display his wide knowledge and his conviction—this at least being consistent with his own work—that expression, as found in such artists as Rembrandt and Caravaggio, constituted a higher state of art than the ideal beauty advocated by Winckelmann. Fuseli’s art-historical erudition was further expressed in a widely revised edition of Matthew Pilkington’s A General Dictionary of Artists (1805) and in his own ‘History of Art in the Schools of Italy’, projected from 1808 (see Knowles). His Aphorisms, Chiefly Relative to the Fine Arts, which he had noted since 1788, perhaps in emulation of those of his friend Lavater, were published in 1818.

Georg Paula and David Blayney Brown. "Füssli." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T030261pg3 (accessed May 1, 2012).