Henry Fuseli

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry Fuseli was born on the 7th of February 1741 in Zürich, the second of eighteen children, and he died on the 17th of April 1825 at the house of the Countess of Guildford on Putney Hill. In between those two dates, he painted more than two hundred pictures, delivered twelve lectures at the Royal Academy, and produced around eight hundred sketches and designs. He was exiled from Switzerland as a young man for helping expose a corrupt official, reinvented himself in Italy by changing his name, fell out with a feminist pioneer who pursued him across London, and ended up buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral. His most famous painting, The Nightmare, depicted a sleeping woman pinned beneath a crouching demon, and it became one of the most widely reproduced images of his era. What drove a Swiss minister-in-training to become the painter of darkness? And how did a man who once dismissed nature with the exclamation "Damn Nature! she always puts me out" come to shape the imagination of William Blake and generations of British artists?

• 2. Flight From Zürich

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  At the Caroline college of Zürich, one of Fuseli's schoolmates was Johann Kaspar Lavater, a friendship that would upend both their lives. Fuseli took holy orders in 1761, apparently on course for the career his father had intended. But shortly after, he and Lavater helped expose an unjust magistrate, whose powerful family sought revenge. The two men were effectively forced to flee. Fuseli's father, Johann Caspar Füssli, was himself a painter of portraits and landscapes and the author of a book called Lives of the Helvetic Painters, so art was never foreign to the household. Still, it was Sir Joshua Reynolds who set the decisive course. Fuseli visited England in 1765, scraping by through miscellaneous writing, and eventually showed his drawings to Reynolds. Reynolds advised him to devote himself entirely to art. That nudge sent Fuseli to Italy in 1770, where he remained for eight years and where he shed the name Füssli in favour of the more Italian-sounding Fuseli. In Rome, he moved in circles that included the Scottish artist Alexander Runciman and the Swedish sculptor Tobias Sergel.

• 3. The Nightmare and the Supernatural

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  The Nightmare was exhibited in 1782 and became the painting that first drew wide public attention to Fuseli. It showed a sleeping woman with a crouching demon squatting on her chest, and Fuseli returned to the subject in several versions. The themes running through it, horror, dark magic, and sexuality, reappeared in his 1796 work Night-Hag visiting the Lapland Witches. His approach to the supernatural was not casual. He pitched everything on an ideal scale, believing that a certain amount of exaggeration was necessary in the higher branches of historical painting. His conviction was reinforced by long study of Michelangelo's works and the marble statues of the Monte Cavallo in Rome, which he liked to contemplate in the evening, silhouetted against a murky sky or lit by lightning. William Michael Rossetti, writing in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, described his figures as full of life and earnestness, seeming to follow their object with intensity. Rossetti also observed that, like Rubens, Fuseli excelled at setting his figures in motion, and that though his proper sphere was the lofty and terrible, he had a fine perception of the ludicrous, visible especially in his fairy scenes drawn from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

• 4. The Shakespeare and Milton Galleries

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  When Fuseli returned to Britain in early 1779, a commission was already waiting for him from Alderman John Boydell, who was assembling a Shakespeare Gallery. Fuseli painted a number of pieces for Boydell during this period. His ambitions then stretched further. In 1799, he exhibited a series of paintings drawn from the works of John Milton, intending to build a Milton Gallery comparable to what Boydell had done for Shakespeare. He completed forty-seven Milton paintings, many of them very large, at intervals over nine years. The exhibition closed in 1800 after proving a commercial failure. That same year of 1799, he was appointed professor of painting to the Academy. Four years later he became Keeper, resigned the professorship, then resumed it in 1810, holding both offices until his death. Antonio Canova, the Italian sculptor, visited England and was so taken with Fuseli's work that when he returned to Rome in 1817, he arranged for Fuseli to be elected to the first class of the Accademia di San Luca.

• 5. Methods and Materials

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  Fuseli rarely drew from life. His practice rested on the antique and on Michelangelo, and his methods were deliberately at odds with convention. Rather than laying out his palette in any orderly way, he scattered colours across it at random. He often worked with pigments in dry powder form, mixing them hastily on the brush with oil, turpentine, or gold size, in whatever quantity came to hand, trusting chance for the final effect. One possible explanation for this recklessness: he did not begin painting in oil until he was twenty-five. His drawing technique was equally idiosyncratic. He would set down arbitrary points on a sheet, which then became the extreme points of the various limbs of a figure. He threw his figures into contorted attitudes and deliberately exaggerated human proportions. Notable drawings made by this method were produced together with the artist George Richmond during a period when both men were in Rome. His sketches and designs, numbering around eight hundred, were frequently judged superior to his finished paintings. He produced no landscapes at all, and painted only two portraits.

• 6. Relationships and Legacy

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  Mary Wollstonecraft, the early feminist whose portrait Fuseli had painted, planned a trip with him to Paris and pursued him with determination. His wife Sophia Rawlins, whom he had married in 1788 and who had originally been one of his models, put a stop to the correspondence. Fuseli's own recorded view of clever women, that they were only troublesome, became one of his more quoted remarks. He had also given the poet William Cowper valuable assistance in preparing a translation of Homer, and he supervised the first English edition of Lavater's work on physiognomy. His pupils at the Academy included David Wilkie, Benjamin Haydon, William Etty, and Edwin Landseer. William Blake, born in 1757, was inspired by him as well. His principal written contribution was a series of twelve lectures delivered to the Royal Academy, begun in 1801. He was, unusually for an artist of his era, fluent in French, Italian, English, and German, though he preferred German as the vehicle for his own thinking. He died comparatively wealthy, and was buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral. He was succeeded as Keeper of the Royal Academy by Henry Thomson.