|
JMW Turner (1775-1851)
Impressionistic landscape art
Thomas Girtin (1775-1802)
First major watercolourist.
John Constable (1776-1837)
Naturalist landscape painter
Alfred Stevens (1817-75)
Sculpture, decorative art
GF Watts (1817-1904)
Portrait painter, muralist
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82)
Romantic leader of Pre-Raphaelites
John Everett Millais (1829-96)
Academic portraitist
TOP PAINTERS IN
ENGLAND
For a list of the most important
portraitist, history painters and
landscape artists in oils and
watercolours, during the
eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, (1700-1900) see:
Best English Painters.
WORLDS TOP ARTISTS
For top creative practitioners, see:
Best Artists of All Time.
For the top allegorical painting,
see: Best History Painters.
WORLD'S BEST ART
For a list of the best examples of
Fine Art Painting, by the
world's top artists, see below:
Greatest Paintings Ever
Oils, watercolours, mixed
media from 1300-present.
WHAT IS ART?
For an explanation of the
aesthetic issues surrounding
the creative visual arts, see:
Art Definition, Meaning
|
Rome
His years in Rome, from 1770 to 1778, influenced
him profoundly. He soon found himself at the center of a talented group
of like-minded English and continental artists which included Alexander
Runciman, Johan Tobias Sergei, and Nicolai Abildgaard. In addition to
the Antique, Fuseli studied carefully the works of Michelangelo and certain
artists of the Mannerism style,
and from these diverse sources forged a distinctive personal aesthetic.
The Nightmare
In 1779 Fuseli returned to London and began exhibiting history paintings
regularly at the Royal
Academy. His picture The Nightmare (1781; Detroit Institute
of Arts) was an immediate success. It has become Fuseli's most famous
painting, and was a landmark in the development of Romanticism. The
Nightmare owes its enduring popularity to 2 main factors: it was one
of the first paintings to successfully portray an intangible idea, rather
than an event, a person, or a story. Second, the exact intentions of the
artist remain obscure. The creature squatting on the woman is an incubus
or mara. It is this demon who is causing the nightmare rather than
the horse (or "night-mare") that peers through the curtains.
Alternatively the painting may have been conceived as an act of sexual
revenge. On the back of the canvas, there is an unfinished portrait of
a girl who may have been the object of the artist's unrequited attention.
In 1786 Fuseli was commissioned to paint
nine illustrations for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery (opened 1789). In
1800 he exhibited 47 paintings of subjects from Milton which had occupied
him during the 1790s. He became a member of the Royal Academy in 1799,
Professor of Painting in 1800, and Keeper in 1804. His important contributions
to the literature and theory of art included his series of lectures to
the students of the Royal Academy and his additions to Pilkington's Lives
of the Artists (1805), as well as his book Lectures on Painting
(1801) and his translation of Winckelmann's Reflections on the Painting
and Sculpture of the Greeks (1765).
Painting Style
The characteristics of Fuseli's mature style were well defined before
his departure from Italy. They included dramatic foreshortening of figures,
strong light-shade contrasts, extravagant gestures and distortions of
scale, and a preference for new, often obscure, literary subjects which
stressed the demonic side of human nature. In his works, the aesthetic
of the Sublime was given its most extreme visual articulation. He also
had a special line in pictures of female cruelty and bondaged males. He
was also obsessed with women's hair.
Paintings by Henry Fuseli
Works by Henry Fuseli hang in several of
the world's best art museums, including
the Louvre (Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking, 1784), the Kunsthaus Zurich
(Titania Awakes, Surrounded by Attendant Fairies, 1794),the Detroit
Institute of Arts (The Nightmare, 1781), and the National Gallery
of Art, Washington DC (Oedipus Cursing His Son Polynices, 1786).
|
