Fuseli, Henry [Johann Heinrich F�ssli]
(* Zurich, 6 Feb 1741; � Putney Hill, nr London, 16 April 1825). Painter,
draughtsman and writer, active in England, son of (1) Johann Caspar F�ssli.
He spent most of his working life in England, where he established himself
as the most original history painter and draughtsman of his generation.
Renowned for his treatment of bizarre and psychologically penetrating
subjects, he was also a prolific writer and, from 1779, Professor of Painting
at the Royal Academy.
1. Life and work.
Fuseli received rigorous art-historical training from his father, becoming
acquainted with the Neo-classical ideas of Johann Joachim Winckelmann
and Anton Raphael Mengs: his godfather was the poet and artist Salomon
Gessner. The Anglophile scholars Johann Jacob Bodmer and Johann Jacob
Breitinger introduced him to Classical philology and to Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton and the Nibelungenlied. This training impressed upon
Fuseli the affinity of painting and poetry and the power of poetic imagery in
defining human experience.
Although Fuseli started to draw when he was eight, copying engravings
in his father�s collection, he was ordained into the Zwinglian ministry in
1761. However, the following year he and his close friends Johann Kaspar
Lavater and Felix Hess published an attack on a corrupt Zurich magistrate.
As a result, they were unofficially advised to leave the city for a while, and
in 1763 they toured Germany. They visited the mathematician and art
theorist Johann Georg Sulzer in Berlin, the Protestant theologian Johann
Joachim Spalding in Barth, Pomerania, and the poet Friedrich Klopstock at
Quedlinburg. Fuseli returned to Berlin that year to assist Sulzer with his
Allgemeine Theorie der sch�nen K�nste.
At this time Fuseli�s interests were primarily in literature and moral
philosophy, and when he visited London in 1764 it was chiefly to explore
English literature and to forge links between English and German writers.
He travelled with the English charg� d�affaires in Berlin, Sir Andrew
Mitchell, through whom he met the publisher Joseph Johnson (1738�1809)
and made many influential friends in his circle. In London Fuseli began to
take a serious interest in art and was drawn to literary and theatrical life,
particularly David Garrick�s performances. Encouraged to become a
painter by Joshua Reynolds, whom he met in 1767 or 1768, Fuseli finally
abandoned theology and philosophy, though never literature. He had been
making drawings sporadically since boyhood and had produced illustrations
for Tobias Smollett�s Peregrine Pickle (1769) and Dr Willoughby�s
Practical Family Bible (1766�70), but his greater ambitions drove him to
Rome in 1770 to devote himself to high art.
Fuseli reached Rome, via Genoa and Florence, at the end of May. His
eight-year stay was broken only by visits to Venice in 1772, to recuperate
from fever, and to Naples in 1775. Although brought up on Winckelmann�s
idealization of Greek art and condemnation of Michelangelo, Fuseli found
himself overwhelmed not only by the grandeur and scale of Roman
sculptures�as expressed in his powerful drawing of The Artist in Despair
over the Magnitude of Antique Fragments (the Right Hand and Left
Foot of the Colossus of Constantine) (c. 1778�80; Zurich, Ksthaus; see
fig. 1)�but also by the heroic drama of Michelangelo�s Sistine Chapel
frescoes. Rejecting the excessively pure archaism of Winckelmann and
Mengs, Fuseli developed his own fusion of the linear and compositional
discipline of Roman relief sculpture with the more dramatically expressive
rendering of the human form achieved by Michelangelo and such Mannerist
artists as Parmigianino and Rosso Fiorentino. Fuseli�s art was concerned
uniquely with the human figure seen in tragic or violent situations drawn
from Aeschylus, Homer, Dante and especially Shakespeare (e.g. The King
of Denmark is Poisoned by his Brother while Sleeping, 1771; Zurich,
Graph. Samml. Eidgen�ss. Tech. Hochsch.). His choice of subjects,
dramatic composition and rapidly developing mastery of stylized form soon
made him the most original artist then working in Rome and the focus of an
international circle of followers and friends, including Johann Tobias Sergel,
Nicolai Abildgaard, John and Alexander Runciman, Thomas Banks,
George Romney, James Barry and James Northcote. His reputation spread
beyond Italy, and his literary friends in Germany acclaimed his work as the
visual counterpart of their own Sturm und Drang movement.
In 1778 Fuseli returned to Zurich, where he began painting an episode
from Swiss history, the Oath of the R�tli (completed 1780), for the
Rathaus. This was based on a drawing executed in his last days in Rome.
Although reunited with Lavater and other old friends in Zurich, he was
bitterly nostalgic for Rome and torn between emotional attachments to
Magdalena Hess and to Lavater�s niece Anna Landolt. The rejection of his
suit by Anna�s father so upset him that he returned to London in 1779,
where he rejoined his old friends around Joseph Johnson and widened his
circle to include the bankers Thomas Coutts (1735�1822) and William
Roscoe of Liverpool and William Lock (1732�1810) of Norbury, all of
whom were to become important patrons. From this period he styled
himself Fuseli and dedicated himself to history painting on a grand scale,
transferring to canvas the bold and disturbing imagery and massive, heroic
abstraction of his Roman drawings. His deficient technique provoked
hostile reactions at first, but in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1781 he
had his first great success with The Nightmare (Detroit, MI, Inst. A.), a
remarkable evocation of a mood and moment of terror in a rhythmic
composition that is also dependent on motifs from Hellenistic sculpture. This
picture�perhaps an attempt to exorcise Fuseli�s bitterness against Anna
Landolt by punishing her with a dream�was to be followed a decade later
by a more distanced and rational reworking of the theme, in which the
symptoms of disturbed sleep were given almost clinical description
(Weimar, Goethe-Nmus. Frauenplan).
Shakespeare�s plays continued to provide subjects for Fuseli in major
pictures including the Three Witches (1783; Stratford-upon-Avon, Royal
Shakespeare Mus.) and Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking (1784; Paris,
Louvre). These established beyond doubt his claim to rank alongside
Reynolds and Benjamin West as a history painter and to surpass them in
emotional force to the extent that his work appeared antithetical to their
sober classicism. They also assured his position as one of the originators,
and possibly a proposer while still in Rome, of John Boydell�s Shakespeare
Gallery. Up to the first exhibition of the Gallery in 1789, most of Fuseli�s
energies were devoted to this project. The critical success of his pictures
contributed largely to his reputation and to his election as Associate of the
Royal Academy in 1788 and full Academician in 1790, despite the
opposition of Reynolds. Fuseli�s contributions to the Shakespeare Gallery
were the most numerous and indeed, including work such as Titania and
Bottom (completed 1790; London, Tate), the most original; despite this he
initially received less for his paintings than Reynolds, West or James Barry.
This lack of financial recompense and a resentment that Boydell was
more concerned with profit than the promotion of history painting prompted
Fuseli to venture a scheme over which he could retain total control. In 1790
he began his own Milton Gallery, working against a stormy emotional
background. In 1788 he had married Sophia Rawlins, who had been an
amateur artist�s model and would often feature in his work. The following
year, however, he met the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, a friend of William
Blake, whom Fuseli had known and admired since c. 1787. Her infatuation
with Fuseli led her in 1792 to propose that the three of them go to Paris to
witness the Revolution, but this suggestion was dropped when Fuseli�s wife
put a stop to the association. He meanwhile persuaded his friends, including
Coutts, Lock, Johnson and Roscoe, to underwrite the Milton Gallery by
regular subscription, thus providing an annual income while work
progressed on such pictures as the Creation of Eve (1793; Hamburg,
Ksthalle). The exhibitions of the 47 paintings in 1799 and 1800 were not,
however, an unqualified success, and the second had to be promoted by an
Academy banquet in Fuseli�s honour. Print sales did not redeem the time
expended on the large paintings, and once again Fuseli gained more respect
than remuneration. In the end his Milton Gallery was a heroic and
instructive failure, admired by Fuseli�s colleagues but rejected by the public.
Both the Shakespeare and Milton subjects gave rein to Fuseli�s
interests in the supernatural, fairy mythology and demonic
superstition�concerns that matched the trend of contemporary thought,
which was moving away from the rational scepticism of the Enlightenment.
While the two large projects occupied most of his attention up to 1800, he
also found time for other themes that gave scope for his obsessions. Thor
Battering the Midgard Serpent (1788; London, RA) was the forerunner
of a series of paintings and drawings illustrating Nordic poets and legends,
while Dante was another favourite source. Throughout his career Fuseli also
produced countless images of women, from portraits of his wife and other
models wearing the latest fashions of clothes or hairstyles to erotic and
disturbing depictions of courtesans and femmes fatales (e.g. Symplegma,
1809�10; London, V&A; see also Erotic art, fig. 7).
In 1799 Fuseli was elected the Academy�s Professor of Painting, a
post he held until 1805; he was made Keeper in 1804. He was re-elected
Professor in 1810, and the statutes were changed to enable him to retain
the Keepership as well. Real financial security came to him only at this time.
His regime at the Academy was liberal and eccentric, but his eye for talent
was unerring, and his pupils included most of the leading names of the next
generation, notably John Constable, Edwin Landseer, William Mulready,
Charles Robert Leslie and Benjamin Robert Haydon. By 1814 Haydon had
turned against Fuseli, offended by his irreverent ideas and by his failure to
recognize the worth of the Elgin marbles. The last quarter of Fuseli�s life
was occupied largely with writing, teaching and formulating his art-historical
ideas. In 1802, during the brief Peace of Amiens, he visited Paris with
Joseph Farington to see the Mus�e Napoleon, and in the following years he
published extensively. His later paintings were often reworkings of earlier
themes but became more dramatic and mysterious than ever through a
bolder and more painterly execution, as in the transparent paintwork of
Garrick and Mrs Pritchard in Macbeth (1812; London, Tate). He died
at the country home of his friend, the Countess of Guildford, and was
buried in St Paul�s Cathedral, London.
2. Working methods and technique.
Throughout his career Fuseli maintained an extremely practical and
professional approach to his art that can seem at odds with its wayward
subject-matter. In his earliest days he took pains to demonstrate his
versatility as an illustrator and portrait painter as well as a historical painter;
in later years he was among the first London artists to exhibit in the
provinces. In addition he was always anxious to oversee, and secure an
adequate return from, the reproduction of his work through prints. An early
massacre of Fuseli�s illustrations for the French edition of Lavater�s
Physiognomische Fragmente (1781�6) put him on his guard against
incompetent reproductive engravers, and he was happy to secure some
help from Blake, who had worked for Johnson since 1779. But Blake was
too much immersed in projects of his own to give the unstinting personal
service Fuseli thought desirable, and Boydell�s Shakespeare Gallery had
proved clearly that in most cases it was the publisher, not the original artist,
who reaped the profits from reproductive prints. This explains in part
Fuseli�s concern to retain complete control of his own Milton Gallery, as
well as his appointment in 1803 of Moses Haughton as his personal
engraver, boarding and employing him until 1819 to engrave and publish his
work and keeping a fair share of the proceeds for himself.
From the outset Fuseli�s art proceeded from drawings, and most of its
formal, tonal and iconographical characteristics were first worked out on
paper. He had no academic or conventional training as a painter and was in
effect self-taught; many of his canvases have deteriorated badly as a result
of faulty or experimental techniques. Even early drawings such as Lear and
the Dead Cordelia (1774; Zurich, Ksthaus) establish the key features of
his art: the setting of monumental figures�whose extremely expressive
attitudes are defined by tense linear strokes of pen or chalk�against vague,
receding darkness washed in grey or purple. The same presentation of
figures against void and shadow occurs constantly in his paintings, where
the literal definition of space is of no concern. However, his use of
chiaroscuro was not exclusive; he claimed he had courted colour all his life
as a despairing lover would a disdainful mistress. Pale muted tones are
often contrasted with passages of vivid local tint to produce a sparkling
effect. His painting technique did not change materially until after c. 1810,
when it became much broader and more impressionistic.
Fuseli�s drawing styles meanwhile had diversified, ranging from sharp
essays in pen and ink, with or without his characteristic washes of greys,
mauves and ochres, to softer and more subtly modulated use of
unaccompanied pencil or black chalk. His later drawings tend to be more
suggestive than assertive and achieve an almost ghostly effect, in contrast to
the vigorous linearity of earlier work. These technical changes in both
drawings and paintings accompanied developments in his approach to
composition. The highly wrought and strained schemes of his Roman and
post-Roman phases gave way in the 1790s to simpler and perhaps more
consciously classical arrangements that suggest analogies with antique reliefs
and John Flaxman�s line engravings. These patterns in turn yield to more
shadowed�and sometimes nocturnal�groupings, in which outline is
cloaked by tone.
3. Writings and lectures.
Fuseli�s writings, which include poetry, translation, journalism, theory and
history, in retrospect appear scarcely less influential than his art. His earliest
publications, an English translation (1765) of Winckelmann�s Reflections
on the Paintings and Sculptures of the Greeks and Remarks on the
Writings and Conduct of J.-J. Rousseau (1767; the first unfavourably
reviewed and the second largely ignored), are based on initial enthusiasms
that he later qualified. Fuseli also worked in London on a History of
German Poetry in 1769 (MS. destr. 1770), but suspended literary
activities while in Rome. On his return to England he reviewed books and
Academy exhibitions in Johnson�s Analytical Review (with no hesitations
about praising his own work). He also continued to translate, producing a
free rendering of Lavater�s Aphorisms on Man in 1788 and contributing to
Johnson�s edition of his friend�s Physiognomische Fragmente (1792).
Fuseli�s reviews are significant barometers of his own thinking. Writing
of Murphy�s Tacitus in 1793, he revealed a change of heart over the
French Revolution, having, like most moderate intellectuals, been turned
against it by the Terror. Although he rejected his early enthusiasm for
Rousseau�s ideas as Utopian, Fuseli adopted his belief that art is both the
product of, and a threat to, corrupt society. Yet far from rejecting art,
Fuseli proceeded to the more radical conclusion that art and morality were
distinct, an idea that underpinned the amoral and exceptional character of
his own work. In a review of the Rev. R. A. Bromley�s Philosophical and
Critical History of the Fine Arts (1793) he uncompromisingly stated that
the �moral usefulness� of the arts �is at best accidental and negative�
(Analytical Review, xvi (1793), pp. 242�3). Thus he saw nothing
blasphemous in making Satan the real hero of his Milton series, presenting
him as a rebellious figure with whom he could identify as an artist, while his
lack of specific faith by this stage of his life (or perhaps a residual
puritanism) made him reluctant to depict God except on his own secular
terms.
Discussing Reynolds�s last Discourse (1791), Fuseli challenged his
fellow painter�s theory of imitation with the view that, while only a mind
equal to Michelangelo�s could profit by copying him, such a mind would
never �condescend� to do so. However, he shared Reynolds�s opinion that
artistic excellence was only to be acquired through study and selection from
nature, thus differing from Blake, who believed the artist should look
beyond the visible world and seek out genius in his own innate ideas.
Although Fuseli declared Blake �damned good to steal from�, he was not
sympathetic to the visionary side of Blake�s art, believing that it displayed
more of �fancy� than true �imagination�. Historians have tended to
exaggerate the proximity of the two artists: nevertheless Fuseli was
prepared to support the publication of Blake�s designs and in 1796
contributed an unsigned introduction to Blake�s edition of Edward Young�s
Night Thoughts.
Fuseli�s ultimately classicist ideas on artistic education crystallized in his
Academy lectures, begun in 1801. These were splendidly unprejudiced and
never promoted the character or claims of his own art; indeed his dismissal
of personal eccentricities, his condemnation of violent or frightening themes
and his attacks on the Italian Mannerists are strongly at variance with it. His
belief in excellence through selection from nature and in the absolute
superiority of classical art, followed in the hierarchy by Roman and
Florentine painting, were essentially unoriginal. More interesting are his
asides on the history of art and on his contemporaries, which display his
wide knowledge and his conviction�this at least being consistent with his
own work�that expression, as found in such artists as Rembrandt and
Caravaggio, constituted a higher state of art than the ideal beauty
advocated by Winckelmann. Fuseli�s art-historical erudition was further
expressed in a widely revised edition of Matthew Pilkington�s A General
Dictionary of Artists (1805) and in his own �History of Art in the Schools
of Italy�, projected from 1808 (see Knowles). His Aphorisms, Chiefly
Relative to the Fine Arts, which he had noted since 1788, perhaps in
emulation of those of his friend Lavater, were published in 1818.
WRITINGS
trans.: Reflections on the Paintings and Sculptures of the Greeks
(London, 1765)
Remarks on the Writings and Conduct of J.-J. Rousseau (London,
1767, rev. Zurich, 1962)
Aphorisms, Chiefly Relative to the Fine Arts (London, 1818)
The Collected English Letters of Henry Fuseli, ed. D. H. Weinglass
(New York, 1982) [complete edn: excellent annotations and concise
biogs of correspondents and friends]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. Cunningham: �Henry Fuseli�, The Lives of the Most Eminent British
Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ii (London, 1830)
J. Knowles: The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Esq., 3 vols
(London, 1831) [comprehensive early biog. with col. of Fuseli�s pubns
and lectures and transcription of the �History of Art in the Schools of
Italy�]
A. Federmann: Johann Heinrich F�ssli: Dichter und Maler,
1741�1825 (Zurich, 1927)
P. Ganz: The Drawings of Henry Fuseli (New York, 1949)
E. C. Mason: The Mind of Henry Fuseli: Selections from his Writings
with an Introductory Essay (London, 1951)
N. Powell: The Drawings of Henry Fuseli (London, 1951)
F. Antal: Fuseli Studies (London, 1956)
G. Schiff: Johann Heinrich F�sslis Milton-Galerie, Schweizerisches
Institut f�r Kunstwissenschaft, iv (Zurich, 1963) [fullest study of this
crucial aspect of Fuseli�s career]
M. Pointon: Milton and English Art (Manchester, 1970) [incl. concise
account of Fuseli�s career, with selection of pls]
N. Powell: Fuseli: �The Nightmare� (London, 1972)
P. Tomory: The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli (London, 1972)
G. Schiff: Johann Heinrich F�ssli: Oeuvrekatalog (Zurich, 1973)
Henry Fuseli (exh. cat. by G. Schiff; London, Tate; Hamburg, Ksthalle;
1975) [good pls and chronology; strong emphasis on psychological
interpretation of Fuseli�s iconography]
The Fuseli Circle in Rome: Early Romantic Art of the 1770s (exh. cat.
by N. L. Pressly, New Haven, CT, Yale Cent. Brit. A., 1979)
F�ssli e Dante (exh. cat., ed. C. Gizzi; Pescara, Casa Dante, Torre
Passeri, 1985)
Bibliography
Writings
Reflections on the Paintings and Sculptures of the
Greeks, London 1765, translation dal tedesco in inglese
di J. J. Winckelmann, Gedanken �ber die Nachahmung
der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und
Bildhauerkunst, Remarks on the Writings and Conduct
of J. J. Rousseau, London 1767
Aphorisms on Man translated from the Original
Manuscript of the Rev. John Caspar Lavater, Citizen of
Zurich, London 1788, translation dal tedesco in inglese
di J. C. Lavater, Vermischten unphysiognomischen
Regeln zur Menschenkenntnis
Essay on Physiognomy by J. C. Lavater, London 1789,
translation dal tedesco in inglese di J. C. Lavater,
Physiognomische Fragmente zur Bef�rderung der
Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe,
Advertisement in W. Blake, Blair's Grave, London 1805
voci biografiche di artisti per il Pilkington's Dictionary
of Painters, London 1805-1810
Aphorisms, chiefly concerning the Fine Arts (trad. it.
Rome 1989), in J. Knowles, The Life and Writings of
Henry Fuseli, London 1831, 3 voll.
A History of Art in the Schools of Italy, ivi.
Lectures I-XII, ivi.
Books
J. Konwles, op. cit.
B. R. Haydon, W. Hazlitt, Painting - The British School,
in Painting and the Fine Arts: Being the Articles under
those Heads contributed to the Seventh Edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica, Edinborough 1838
A. Federmann, Johann Heinrich F�ssli Dichter und
Maler, 1741-1825, Zurich-Lipsia 1927
S. Sitwell, Narrative Pictures. A Survey of English
Genre and its Painters, London 1937
E. Jaloux, Johann-Heinrich F�ssli, Montreux 1942
R. Todd, Tracks in the Snow, London 1946
P. Ganz, Die Zeichnungen Hans Heinrich F�ssli,
Bern-Olten 1947
E. C. Mason, The Mind of Henry Fuseli.