Henry FUSELI RA
Zurich 1741 - Putney Hill 1825
Biography
Although born and brought up in Switzerland, the artist and writer Henry Fuseli spent most of his career in England, apart from a period of about a year in Germany and some eight years in Italy. The son of a minor Swiss painter of portraits and landscapes from an old Zurich family, Fuseli was educated at the Collegium Carolinum in the city which was the intellectual and literary capital of Switzerland in the 18th century. Fuseli became part of a highly educated circle that included his fellow student, the poet and physiognomist Johan Kaspar Lavater, and the historian Johan Jakob Bodmer, who was his teacher and first instilled in the young student an abiding love of the works of Shakespeare and John Milton, as well as Dante, Homer and the Nibelungenlied. Fuseli was extremely well read and became proficient in several languages apart from his native German, including English, French, Italian, Latin and Greek. Destined by his father for the church, he was ordained into the Zwinglian Swiss Reformed Church at the age of twenty, at the same time as Lavater. In 1762 Fuseli and Lavater published an attack on a corrupt local magistrate and the following year had to leave Switzerland to avoid the repercussions caused the official’s powerful family. After several months in Berlin, where Fuseli came into contact with several German writers, he settled in London in 1764. The following year he published a translation of the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s writings on Greek art into English and visited France as tutor to the young Lord Chewton, the teenage son of Lord Waldegrave, meeting Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume in Paris.
While Fuseli had drawn since his childhood, during his early years in London he expressed himself mainly in his writings. In 1768, however, he met Sir Joshua Reynolds, the President of the Royal Academy, who encouraged him to become a painter and to travel to Rome. With the support of several friends and patrons, including the wealthy banker Thomas Coutts, he was able to spend the years between 1770 and 1778 studying in Italy, mainly in Rome but with visits to Naples, Florence and Venice. A passionate admirer of Michelangelo and the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel in particular, which he copied extensively, Fuseli became part of a circle of foreign-born artists working in Rome that included Nicolai Abildgaard, Thomas Banks, John Brown and Johan Tobias Sergel. From Italy he occasionally sent back works to be shown at the Royal Academy and the Society of Artists. After his return to London he began to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy, enjoying some success in the 1780s with such imaginative, grandiose and inventive compositions as The Nightmare, shown to considerable acclaim at the Royal Academy in 1782 and arguably his most famous painting, Macbeth and the Three Witches and Lady Macbeth Walking in her Sleep. He was inspired by performances of Shakespeare and other works on the London stage, and a theatrical influence is manifest in many of his early paintings. Fuseli continued to enjoy the patronage of Coutts and also received commissions from the Liverpool banker, lawyer and abolitionist William Roscoe, while among his pupils was the amateur painter William Lock of Norbury. Another early supporter was the influential publisher Joseph Johnson, through whom Fuseli met William Blake, who was to become a good friend, and Mary Wollstonecraft, who fell in love with him. Fuseli was elected an Associate of the Academy in 1788 and a Royal Academician in 1790.
Throughout his career, Fuseli’s work remained deeply rooted in literature. From 1786 he produced nine paintings to illustrate John Boydell’s ‘Shakespeare Gallery’, and a few years later began his single greatest task; a series of more than fifty paintings of subjects taken from the writings of John Milton. The project took a decade to come to fruition, and the paintings – many of them on a monumental scale – were exhibited, as the ‘Milton Gallery’, on Pall Mall in London in 1799 and 1800 but with little commercial success, and the artist came close to financial ruin. Fuseli served as Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy Schools from 1799 to 1805 and again from 1810 onwards, and as Keeper from 1784. Among his students at the Royal Academy were William Etty, Benjamin Robert Haydon, Edwin Landseer, John Linnell, William Mulready and David Wilkie. Although Fuseli was much respected in artistic circles in London as a member of the Royal Academy and a noted Professor, his paintings and drawings were little known outside of a small group of aristocratic private collectors, and he was largely forgotten by the middle of the 19th century. It was not until the centenary of Fuseli’s death that his work became known to a wider audience, when an exhibition of 361 drawings and paintings, mainly from Swiss and English collections, was held at the Kunsthaus in Zurich in 1926. In 1941 an even larger exhibition was held at the same museum, which today houses the most comprehensive collection of Fuseli’s oeuvre.
Fuseli occupies an important place in the history of drawing in Britain. His intellectual background, which set him apart from almost any other artist working in England at the same time, is reflected in his conception of his own art, and this is especially true in his drawings. Around 1,400 drawings by the artist are known today, of which the largest single group, amounting to over six hundred sheets, is in the Kunsthaus in Zurich. Relatively few of his drawings may be related to finished paintings, and most seem to have been done as independent exercises. As Paul Ganz has noted, in one of the earliest modern surveys of the artist’s output as a draughtsman, ‘Fuseli’s drawings are less the product of his age than his paintings; they are the direct expression of his creative power and reveal his personal outlook and his fiery artistic temperament…In the drawings the artist’s genius has unfolded itself in a free and unrestricted manner without regard to contemporary taste; they therefore open the way to a proper understanding of his art and reveal what was unusual in it and far ahead of his time.’ Similarly, a more recent writer has commented that ‘Fuseli concentrated especially on original subjects and inventive interpretations of those subjects, especially in drawings. Indeed, the drawings are the most immediate evidence of the sparkling genius, the tenderness, the intense and highly eccentric individuality that was Fuseli’s.’ The majority of Fuseli’s extant drawings date from the 1770s onwards, as much of his earliest output was lost in a fire at the home of his friend and patron Joseph Johnson in 1770.
As has recently been noted, ‘Fuseli would remain an indefatigable draughtsman till the end of his life; and for him drawing would always retain its capacity to operate as a clandestine area of creative freedom – a space where he could be at liberty to break the rules, and give untrammelled expression to his genius.’
