Henry Fuseli
Henry Fuseli James Northcote. | |
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Born | Johann Heinrich Füssli 7 February 1741 |
Died | 17 April 1825 Putney Hill, London, England | (aged 84)
Nationality | Swiss |
Known for | Painting, draughtsmanship |
Notable work | The Nightmare |
Movement | Romanticism |
Spouse |
Sophia Rawlins (m. 1788) |
Henry Fuseli RA (/ˈfjuːzəli, fjuːˈzɛli/ FEW-zə-lee, few-ZEL-ee;[1][2][3] German: Johann Heinrich Füssli [ˈjoːhan ˈhaɪ̯nʁɪç ˈfyːsli]; 7 February 1741 – 17 April 1825) was a Swiss painter, draughtsman, and writer on art who spent much of his life in Britain. Many of his works depict supernatural experiences, such as The Nightmare. He painted works for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and created his own "Milton Gallery". He held the posts of Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy. His style had a considerable influence on many younger British artists, including William Blake.
Biography
This section relies largely or entirely on a single source. (August 2022) |
Fuseli was born in Zürich, Switzerland, the second of 18 children.[4] His father was Johann Caspar Füssli, a painter of portraits and landscapes, and author of Lives of the Helvetic Painters. He intended Henry for the church, and sent him to the Caroline college of Zürich, where he received a classical education. One of his schoolmates there was Johann Kaspar Lavater, with whom he became close friends.
After taking
Early in 1779 he returned to Britain, visiting Zürich on the way. In London, he found a commission awaiting him from
In 1799 Fuseli exhibited a series of paintings from subjects furnished by the works of John Milton, with a view to forming a Milton gallery comparable to Boydell's Shakespeare gallery. There were 47 Milton paintings, many of them very large, completed at intervals over nine years. The exhibition proved a commercial failure and closed in 1800. In 1805 he brought out an edition of Matthew Pilkington's Lives of the Painters, which did little for his reputation.[4][further explanation needed]
Antonio Canova, when on his visit to England, was much taken with Fuseli's works, and on returning to Rome in 1817 caused him to be elected a member of the first class in the Accademia dI San Luca.[4]
Works
As a painter, Fuseli favoured the supernatural. He pitched everything on an ideal scale, believing a certain amount of exaggeration necessary in the higher branches of historical painting. In this theory he was confirmed by the study of Michelangelo's works and the marble statues of the Monte Cavallo,[4][8] which, when at Rome, he liked to contemplate in the evening, relieved against a murky sky or illuminated by lightning.[4]
Describing his style, William Michael Rossetti in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition said that:
His figures are full of life and earnestness, and seem to have an object in view which they follow with intensity. Like Rubens he excelled in the art of setting his figures in motion. Though the lofty and terrible was his proper sphere, Fuseli had a fine perception of the ludicrous. The grotesque humour of his fairy scenes, especially those taken from A Midsummer-Night's Dream, is in its way not less remarkable than the poetic power of his more ambitious works.[4]
Though not noted as a colourist,
Fuseli painted more than 200 pictures, but he exhibited only a small number of them. His earliest painting represented Joseph Interpreting the Dreams of the Baker and Butler, but the first to excite particular attention was The Nightmare, exhibited in 1782, a painting of which he painted several versions.[4] Themes seen in The Nightmare such as horror, dark magic and sexuality, were echoed in his 1796 painting, Night-Hag visiting the Lapland Witches.[10]
His sketches or designs numbered about 800; they have admirable qualities of invention and design and are frequently superior to his paintings. In his drawings, as in his paintings, his methods included deliberately exaggerating the proportions of the human body and throwing his figures into contorted attitudes. One technique involved setting down arbitrary points on a sheet, which then became the extreme points of the various limbs.[4] Notable examples of these drawings were made in concert with George Richmond when the two artists were together in Rome.[11] He rarely drew figures from life, basing his art on study of the antique and Michelangelo.
He produced no
Many interesting anecdotes of Fuseli, and his relations to contemporary artists, are given in his Life by John Knowles (1831).[4] He influenced the art of Fortunato Duranti.
Writings
In 1788 Fuseli started to write essays and reviews for the
When Louis XVI was executed in France in 1793, Fuseli condemned the revolution as despotic and anarchic,[where?] although he had first welcomed it as a sign of "an age pregnant with the most gigantic efforts of character".[citation needed]
He was a thorough master of French, Italian, English and German, and could write in all these languages with equal facility and vigour, although he preferred German as the vehicle of his thoughts. His principal written work was his series of twelve lectures delivered to the Royal Academy, begun in 1801.[4]
Influence
His pupils included David Wilkie, Benjamin Haydon, William Etty, and Edwin Landseer.[12] William Blake, who was 16 years his junior, recognized a debt to him, and for a time many English artists copied his mannerisms.[13][14]
Death
After a life of uninterrupted good health[4] he died at the house of the Countess of Guildford on Putney Hill,[15] at the age of 84, and was buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral.[16] He was comparatively wealthy at the time of his death.[4]
Gallery
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Anna Magdalena Schweizer, 1779
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The artist in conversation with Johann Jakob Bodmer, 1778–1781
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The death of Achilles, 1780
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The two murderers of the Duke of Clarence, 1780–1782
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Titania and Bottom, c. 1790
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Falstaff in the laundry basket, 1792
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The Creation of Eve from Milton's Paradise Lost, 1793
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Macbeth consulting the Vision of the Armed Head, 1793
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The daughters of Pandareus, c. 1795
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Scylla and Charybdis, 1794–1796
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TheNight-Hagvisiting the Lapland Witches, 1796
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Horseman attacked by a giant snake, c. 1800
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Ariel, c. 1800–1810
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Kriemhild and Gunther, 1807
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Romeo stabs Paris at the bier of Juliet, c. 1809
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Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers, 1810–1812
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Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, c. 1810–1820
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Fairy Mab, 1815–1820
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Britomart Delivering Amoretta from the Enchantment of Busirane, 1824
Films
- Passion and Obsession: Henry Fuseli, 1741–1825: painter and writer by Gaudenz Meili and David H. Weinglass, Zurich 1997
See also
- portrait painter(father of Henry Fuseli)
- entomologist(brother of Henry Fuseli)
References and sources
References
- ^ "Fuseli". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.). HarperCollins. Retrieved 14 August 2019.
- ^ "Fuseli". Collins English Dictionary. HarperCollins. Retrieved 14 August 2019.
- ^ "Fuseli, Henry". Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 25 September 2020.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r public domain: Rossetti, William Michael (1911). "Fuseli, Henry". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 11 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 368. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the
- ISBN 978-1-84822-633-3
- ISBN 1854373579
- ^ Thor battering the Midgard Serpent, 1790. Royal Academy of Arts Collections, 5 February 2014. Retrieved 5 February 2014. Archived here.
- ^ Papal Palace on Monte Cavallo, Rome. Retrieved 28 December 2011.
- ^ Leslie, C. R. (1855). Tom Taylor (ed.). Autobiographical Recollections (Letter to Miss Leslie December 1816). Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
- ^ "The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches". The Met. Retrieved 12 November 2019.
- ^ Keay, Carolyn (1974). Henry Fuseli. London: Academy Editions. p. 7.
- ^ Tomory, Peter A. (1972). The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli. New York: Praeger. p 211.
- ISBN 9780900874888.
- ^ "Putney | Old and New London: Volume 6 (pp. 489–503)". British-history.ac.uk. 22 June 2003. Retrieved 14 May 2012.
- Sinclair, W.p. 465: London; Chapman & Hall, Ltd; 1909.
Sources
- "Johann Heinrich Füssli". SIKART Lexicon on art in Switzerland.
- public domain: Rossetti, William Michael (1911). "Fuseli, Henry". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 11 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 368. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
Further reading
- Calè, Luisa. Fuseli's Milton Gallery: 'Turning readers into spectators'. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006.
- Hammelmann, Hans (1957). "Eighteenth-Century English Illustrators: Henry Fuseli, R.A.," The Book Collector 6 No.4 (winter): 350–363.
- Lentzsch, Franziska, et al. Fuseli: The Wild Swiss. Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2005.
- Myrone, Martin. Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination. London: Tate Publishing, 2006.
- Andrei Pop. Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Powell, Nicolas. Fuseli: The Nightmare. London: Allen Lane, 1973.
- Pressly, Nancy L. The Fuseli Circle in Rome: Early Romantic Art of the 1770s. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1979.
- Weinglass, David H. Henry Fuseli and the Engraver's Art. Boston: World Wide Books, 1982.
External links
External videos | |
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Fuseli's Titania and Bottom, Smarthistory |
- Works by Henry Fuseli at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Henry Fuseli at Internet Archive
- Works by Henry Fuseli at Open Library
- Profile on Royal Academy of Arts Collections
- Fuseli's Lecture on Painting 1801
- Petri Liukkonen. "Henry Fuseli". Books and Writers.
- 31 artworks by or after Henry Fuseli at the Art UK site