Fuseli, Henry (Johann Heinrich F�ssli) (1741-1825). Swiss-born
painter, draughtsman, and writer on art, active mainly in England, where he was
one of the outstanding figures of the
Romantic
movement.
He was the son of a portrait painter, Johann Caspar F�ssli (1707-82),
but he originally trained as a priest; he took holy orders in 1761, but
never practised. In 1765 he came to London at the suggestion of the British
Ambassador in Berlin, who had been impressed by his drawings. Reynolds
encouraged him to tape up painting, and he spent the years 1770-78 in Italy,
engrossed in the study of Michelangelo, whose
elevated style he sought to emulate for the rest of his life. On his return
he exhibited highly imaginative works such as The Nightmare (Detroit
Institute of Arts, 1781), the picture that secured his reputation when
it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1782 (there is another version in
the Goethe-museum, Frankfurt). An unforgettable image of a woman in the
throes of a violently erotic dream, this painting shows how far ahead of
his time Fuseli was in exploring the murky areas of the psyche where sex
and fear meet. His fascination with the horrifying and fastastic also comes
out in many of his literary subjects, which formed a major part of his
output; he painted several works for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, and
in 1799 he followed this example by opening a Milton Gallery in Pall Mall
with an exhibition of forty-seven of his own paintings.
Fusely was a much respected and influential figure in his lifetime,
but his work was generally neglected for about a century after his death
until the
Expressionists and
saw in him a kindred spirit. His work can be clumsy and overblown, but
at its best has something of the imaginative intensity of his friend Blake,
who described Fuseli as The only man that e'er I knew / who did not make
me almost spew'. Fuseli's extensive writings on art include Lectures
on Painting (1801) and a translation of Winckelmann's Reflections
on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1765).