 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) |
|
Swiss painter, poet, critic, and teacher, a fervent admirer of Shakespeare, who spent most of his active career in England. Henry Fuseli has often been regarded as a forerunner of the Romantic art movement and a precursor of Symbolism and Surrealism. His most famous painting is The Nightmare (1781), in which an ape-like goblin sits on a young woman, who is sleeping in a strained posture. The only Man that e'er I knew Henry Fuseli was born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zürich into a family of artists and writers. His father was the portrait painter and art historian Johannes Kaspar Füssli. Although Fuseli's brothers and sisters became artists, his father directed him towards priesthood. He studied theology at Caroline College in Zurich, where he was taught by Professor J.J. Bodmer, an early promoter of the Sturm und Drang movement in Switzerland. Later Fuseli portrayed him an a work entitled The Painter in Conversation with Johann Jakob Bodmer (1778-81). Fuseli was ordained a Zwinglian clergyman in 1761. Next year, in consequence of a pamphlet, in which he attacked Felix Grebel, the corrupted administration of a magistrate, he had to leave Zurich. Fuseli's fellow-polemicist, the theologian Johann Casper Lavater, later descibed his friend to Johann Gottfried von Herder as "the most original genius I know. Nothing but energy, profusion and calm! The wildness of the warrior—and the feeling of supreme sublimity! . . . His spirits are storm wind, his ministres fleres of fire! He goes upon the wings of the wind. His laugher is the mockery of hell, and his love—a deadly lightning flash." (The Romantic Revolution: A History by Tim Blanning, New York: Modern Library Paperback Edition, 2012, p. 62) Goethe's reaction was similar: "What fire and fury the man has in him!" he had told Herder. Fuseli had a domineering personality, but he was only five feet two inches in height. His hair was pure white, and he kept it neatly powdered. Fuseli traveled through Germany, and spent then much time in Berlin. There worked on a German translation of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters, which was published in 1763. Lavater and Fuseli remained friends. Fuseli's translation of Lavater's Aphorisms on Man was published in London by Joseph Johnson in 1788. Fuseli also illustrated the original German and French editions of Lavater's Physiognomical Fragments. In 1764, Fuseli went to London to work as a translator of French, German, and Italian books-he was known for being able to swear in nine languages. At the age of twenty-four, he translated into English Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks by the German Neo-Classical theorist J.J. Winckelmann. However, Fuseli did not become Winkelmann's follower. Possibly he had heard that Winckelmann was homosexual. In the introduction to the lectures he delivered as professor of painting at the Royal Academy, Fuseli referred to the art historian's "frigid reveries" and "Platonic dreams of beauty." At first Fuseli also admired another great intellectual figure of the time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom he met in 1776, spent a few hours in his company, but eventually broke with his ideas. Fuseli's book on the French philosopher, Remarks on the Writing and Conduct of J. J. Rousseau, was published anonymously in 1767. Fuseli was an active writer until 1768 without much success.
Because he could not support himself by his pen, he served as a
traveling tutor to the young Lord Chewton, a work which he did not like
and which was much against his temperement. Fuseli had "the wildness of
the warrior", as Lavater had said, and a punch-up ended eventually his
appointment. On the advice of the famous portrait painter Joshua
Reynolds (1723-92), who encouraged Fuseli to devote himself to
painting, he went in 1770 to Rome for eight years. There he abandoned
Winkelmann's refined aestheticism-"noble
simplicity and quiet grandeur" just was not his program. Fuseli taught
himself, mainly by copying Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine
Chapel and drawing from antique sculptures; they remained his major
stylistic influences. Throughout his career, Fuseli's subject matter
was chiefly literary. He also created a
number of erotic drawings ('Symplegma on an Altar before a Term of
Priapus,' 'Symplegma of a Bound and Naked Man with Two Women,' and
others). Among Fuseli's most haunting works dealing with antique is The Artist in Despair over the Magnitude of Antique Fragments (1778-80), in which only a hand, pointing upwards, and a foot, have remained from a colossal statue (of Constantine the Great). The artist himself, who has a massively muscled body, has become a statue. Although Fuseli's technique was highly personal and experimental, his choice of themes influenced so much the other foreign artists in Rome, that he became virtually the leader of a school of painting. His circle included Alexander and John Runciman, the Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel, the English artist Thomas Banks, and the Danish painter Nicolas Abildgaard. Herder wrote in 1774 in a letter to Johann Hamann, that there is living in Rome a noble German from Zürich, Henry Fuseli, "a genius like a mountain torrent," who is a worshipper of Shakespeare. On his return to Zürich Fuseli painted The Oath of the
Ruttli (1779-81), which was destined for the Town Hall. After his
romance with Lavater's niece Anna Landolt failed, he left in 1779 for
London. It is though that his best-known scene, The Nightmare,
refers to this affair. A young woman is mounted by a demonic looking
incubus; the monster literally is a burden on her heart. She lies in a
sprawl, with her arm hanging down. A horse, the "night mare" gazes
through the curtains with phosphorescent eyes, observing or leering. It
has remained a puzzle, whose nightmare Fuseli portrays - it cannot be the woman's because she is part of
the scene herself. It has been said, that the picture is an revenge for
an unfulfilled desire, ultimately perhaps a manifestation of a jealous
passion, in which the strange lover of the woman is reduced into a
monster. On the back of the canvas he painted a portrait of a beautiful woman; it has been suggested that she is Anna Landolt. The work became so popular that Fuseli painted several other versions on request. One version of The Nightmare was published in Erasmus Darwin's poem The Botanic Garden (1789-91). In France, The Nightmare inspired Charles Nodier's fantasy story Smarra, ou Les Démons de la nuit (1821). Fuseli himself was careful not to be tempted by "fancy" and the unknown, but believed in the possible, the probable, and the known-"our ideas are the offspring of our senses," he once said. A Sleeping Woman and the Furies (1821) took the sexual undertones even further. Now the woman is half-naked and her figure suggest that she has been violated. Another cruel fantasy was Wolfram Looking at his Wife, whom he has Imprisoned with the Corpse of her Lover (1812-20). From these and other works it has been concluded, that Fuseli was a misogynist and he feared and loathed dominant women. In 1788 Fuseli married Sophia Rawlins, an uneducated woman from Somerset, whom he used as a model
in a number of erotic and macabre paintings. In Mrs. Fuseli Seated
by a Fireplace
(1799) she was also referred in the figure of the
feared Medusa; the sight of her head turned all living things into
stone. Around the time of his marriage, Fuseli had formed a friendship
with the early feminist Mary Godwin (Wollstonecraft), whose
portrait he also painted. When she began to dream of living – chastely
– with the Fuselis, Sophia decided to close the door to their home
forever. (Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793-1818 by Andrew Cayton, 2013 p. 52) "I hate clever
women," Fuseli once said, "they are only troublesome," but he had enjoyed Wollstonecraft's company. From the beginning of his career, Fuseli was attracted to the plays of William Shakespeare. For him Shakespeare was "the supreme master of passions and the ruler of our hearts". As a teenager he had translated Macbeth into German. In the 1760s Fuseli had seen the famous actor David Garrick in the role of Macbeth and produced a watercolor portraying Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after the murder of Duncan. Later he returned to this play in several paintings in which the figures are surrounded by mysterious darkness, among them Macbeth conculting the vision of the Armed Head, painted for the Shakespeare Gallery in Dublin. The faces of the three sisters in the work were modelled on the face of his old mentor, Johann Jakob Bodmer. His other favorite works included Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, for which he produced numerous sequences. From 1786, Fuseli contributed actively to Boydell's 'Shakespeare Gallery'. Fuseli had read Shakespeare's plays so thoroughly that he supposedly was able to recollect any passage that was quoted. For the Analytical Review
Fuseli started to write in
1788 essays and reviews. With Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Joseph
Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other men and women
interested in art, literature and politics, Fuseli frequented the home
of Joseph Johnson, a publisher and prominent figure in radical British
political and intellectual life. Johnson introduced him him as "a most
ingenious foreigner, whom I think you will like; but, if you wish to
enjoy his conversation you will not attempt to stop the toorrent of his
words by contradicting him." (The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli by John Knowles, 1831, p. 59) When Louis XVI was executed in France in 1793, Fuseli condemned the revolution as despotic and anarchic, although he had first welcomed it as a sign of "an age pregnant with the most gigantic efforts of character." In 1799 he was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy, and keeper of the Academy in 1804. Fuseli's 'Milton Gallery', which was exhibited in 1799, was a financial failure. Already before the opening, it had been criticized in newspapers. When the exhibition opened for the second time in 1800 under the patronage of the Royal Academy, it was still ignored by the public, and Fuseli closed it after four months of anxiety. Despite disappointments, Fuseli also illustrated Dante, Spenser's Faerie Queen, Nordic myths and legends, the Niebelungenlied, medieval poems, and fairy tales. Fuseli's pupils included John Constable (1776-1837), the major English landscape painter of his time, Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846), William Etty (1787-1849), and Edwin Landseer (1802-73), who first exhibited at the age of twelve. At the Royal Academy Fuseli was a popular teacher, in spite of his biting wit. Once he said of a young man's drawing: "It's bad; take it into the fields and shoot it, that's a good boy." For a time many aspiring English artist copied Fuseli's mannerisms. William Blake,
who was sixteen years
Fuseli's junior, recognized a debt to him, but said in an epigram to
the poet William Hayley: "You think Fuseli is not a Great Painter. I'm
glad; This is one
of the best compliments he ever had." (The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist, London: John Lane, 1907, p. 203) Blake's writings did not interest Fuseli, whose favorite contemporary authors were William Cowper (1731-1800) and Thomas Gray (1716-1771). On the other hand when he required a good engraver to prepare a frontispiece to his translation of Lavater's Aphorisms on Man, he asked Blake to do the work. However, Blake was not an easy person to get along with. Although they worked together on a number of designs, by 1803 their paths had separated. Fuseli is said to have admitted that "Blake is d—good to steal from." Fuseli
died on April 16, 1825, at the Countess of Guilford's
country residence at Putney Hill. He was buried at St Paul's Cathedral,
near to Sir Joshua Reynolds. Fuseli's multi-layered identity made him
often feel like an outsider in his adopted home country. Moreover, he
spoke with a distinct accent. By coincidence, there was also another
Johann Heinrich Füßli, whose father was a Zürich painter; he became a
politician and professor of history in Zürich. After her husband's death, Sophia burned all his pornographic drawings,
that were in the house. Fuseli's work fell mostly into neglect,
although his reveries inspired Edgar Allan Poe's
short story 'The Fall of the
House of Usher'. It was not until the 20th century when Fuseli's
imaginative visions were rediscovered by Expressionists, Surrealists
and post-Freudian scholars. Among his admirers was H.P.
Lovecraft, whose narrator in the short story 'Pickman's Model' (October 1927, Weird Tales) says, "Fuseli really brings a shiver while a
cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh." The Nightmare
probably inspired Salvador Dali's painting Invisible Sleeping
Woman, Horse, Lion
(1930). Reputedly the artist Rosa Corder (1853-1893) produced a number
of fake Fuseli artworks. The first study on genuine and fake Fuseli
pornographic drawings, Tracks in the Snow, was published by Ruthven Todd in 1947. Fuseli's
work drew from Neoclassic harmony and narrative
clarity, Romantic eroticism, and Mannerist distortions. The gestures
and movement of his figures were exaggerated, as if they were actors on
a stage. Male bodies have oversteressed muscles; they are men of
action, not thinkers. Fuseli himself was an avid theatergoer, which
perhaps explains also some of his most dramatic light effects. He was
left-handed, and thus shaded his drawings from left to right. There
is a peculiar disparity between what Fuseli painted and
what he wrote about his art. The great name of German Romanticism,
Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) fully accepted the split between the
inner and outer vision. "Preserve a pure, childlike understanding
within yourself and follow the voice of your inner self
unconditionally," was his doctrine, "for it is the Divine in us and
does not lead us astray." (Caspar David Friedrich by Werner Hofmann, London: Thames and Hudson, 2007, p. 51) Fuseli's Lectures on Painting (1801-30),
originally given at the Royal Academy in London, followed the
traditional juxtaposition between the history of ancient and "modern"
art, without giving a view into his inner thoughts. However, Fuseli's
studio was furnished in the style of his paintings. When his pupil
Benjamin Robert Haydon visited his studion on Berners Street in Soho, he saw there "Galvanised
devils-malicious witches brewing their
incantations-Satan bringing Chaos, and
springing upward like a pyramid of fire-Lady
Macbeth-Paolo and Francesca-Falstraff and Mrs Quickly-humour,
pathos, terror, blood and murder met one at every look! I expected the
floor to give way-I fancied Fuseli himself
to be a giant." (The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846),
Edited from his Journals by Tom Taylor, a new edition with an
Introduction by Aldous Huxley, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1926, p. 22) Fuseli's ghostly and frightening subject-matter was a visual continuum of the Gothic novel, which developed an aesthetics of terror and horror, was occupied with dreams and the unconscious, and often looked back to the feudal world. Fuseli once said, that "one of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams and what may be called the personification of sentiments." However, Fuseli himself showed little interest in dreams and inner workings of the psyche, with one exception-like the Romantic writers of the younger generation, Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fuseli used opium. For further reading: Fuseli, Dichter und Maler by Arnold Federmann (1927); Fuseli by Rudolf Beutler (1939); Tracks in the Snow by Ruthven Todd (1947); The Drawings of Henry Fuseli by Paul Ganz (1949); The Mind of Henry Fuseli, ed. by Eudo Mason (1951); The Drawings of Henry Fuseli, edited by C.N.P. Powell (1951); Fuseli Studies by Frederick Antal (1956); J.H. Fuseli by Gert Schiff (1968); The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli by Peter Tomory (1972); Fuseli: The Nightmare by Nicholas Powell (1973); The Fuseli Circle in Rome: Early Romantic Art of the 1770s by Nancy L. Pressly (1979); Phantoms of the Imagination by A.M. Hammacher (1981); Blake and Fuseli: A Study in the Transmission of Ideas by Carol Louise (1985); Prints and Engraved Illustrations by and After Henry Fuseli: A Catalogue Raisonné by D. H. Weinglass (1994); Fuseli to Menzel: Drawings and Watercolors in the Age of Goethe from a German Private Collection by Hinrich Sieveking (1998); Fuseli by Federico Zeri (2001); Henry Fuseli by Martin Myrone (2001); Fuseli: The Wild Swiss, edited by Christoph Becker (2005); Fuseli's Milton Gallery: 'Turning Readers into Spectators' by Luisa Calè (2006); 'Henry Fuseli and Gothic Spectacle' by M. Myrone, in The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol 70; Numb 2 (2007); Caspar David Friedrich by Werner Hofmann (2007); 'Between Fantasy and Angst: Assessing the Subject and Meaning of Henry Fuseli's Late Pornographic Drawings, 1800-25' by C. Smith, in Art History, Vol 33; Number 3 (2010); 'Francesco Clemente on Henry Fuseli' in In My View: Personal Reflections on Art by Today's Leading Artists, edited by Simon Grant (2012); Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli by Andrei Pop (2015); Füsslis Nachtmahr: Traum und Wahnsinn, herausgegeben von Werner Busch und Petra Maisak (2017); Romanticism and Illustration, edited by Ian Haywood (2019); Art, Science and the Body in Early Romanticism by Stephanie O'Rourke (2021); Creator of Nightmares: Henry Fuseli’s Art and Life by Christopher Baker (2025) Selected works:
|
