Henry Fuseli
Biography and Paintings of Swiss/English Romantic History Symbolist Painter.

The Nightmare (1782)

Henry Fuseli (1741-1825)

One of the leading figures of the English Romantic movement, the Swiss symbolist painter John Henry Fuseli (Fussli) created pictures that explored the darker side of the human psyche. Focusing mainly on history painting, Fuseli drew much of his inspiration from literary sources, notably Shakespeare, Milton and Dante.

An important contributor to English figurative painting, after his death he was neglected until his rediscovery by the Expressionists and Surrealists. Fuseli's best work has much of the imaginative intensity of his friend William Blake (1757-1827), although occasionally deficient in technique. Many of Fuseli's paintings are available as prints in the form of poster art.

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Biography

John Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Fussli) was born into a family of distinguished Zurich intellectuals and artists. His father was the portrait painter Johan Caspar Fussli (1706-82). In 1761 he was ordained a Zwinglian minister after studying with the influential literary critics J.J. Breitinger and J.J. Bodmer. It was Bodmer who introduced him to the writings of Milton and Shakespeare and who supported his early interest in art. In 1764 he went to London where he worked as an illustrator and published an English translation of Winckelmann's Gedanken (Reflections; 1765). Determined to become a history painter, he was encouraged by Joshua Reynolds to study in Italy, and to this end he departed for Rome in 1769.

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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).

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