|
THE ENGLISH SCHOOL
For information and facts about
famous artists from England, see:
English Landscape
Painting
18th and 19th century art
William Hogarth (1697-1764)
Painter, Engraver, Satirist
Richard Wilson (1714-82)
First top English landscape painter
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88)
Portrait Painter, Landscapes
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
William Morris (1834-96)
Leader of Arts & Crafts Movement
Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98)
Art Nouveau illustrator.
WORLDS TOP ARTISTS
For top creative practitioners, see:
Best Artists of All Time.
For the greatest view painters, see:
Best Landcape Artists.
For the greatest still life art, see:
Best Still Life Painters.
For the greatest portraitists
see: Best Portrait Artists.
For the greatest genre-painting, see:
Best Genre Painters.
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.
Oil Painting
History, styles and development.
WHAT IS ART?
For an explanation of the
aesthetic issues surrounding
the creative visual arts, see:
Art Definition, Meaning
|
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.
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).
|
