ART SUNDAY - FUSELI

“I have had dreams, and I have had nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.” - Dr. Jonas Salk

For Art Sunday today, a bit of an odd bird, Henry Fuseli, a Swiss-born British Romantic Painter (1741-1825). As well as a painter he was a draughtsman, and writer on art, one of the outstanding figures of the Romantic movement. He was the son of a portrait painter, Johann Caspar Füssli (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 study 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 to England, he exhibited highly imaginative works such as “The Nightmare” (1781), the picture that secured his reputation when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1782 and whish is seen above. This is in the Detroit Institute of Art, but there is another version of this work in the Goethe-museum, in Frankfurt). It is an unforgettable image of a woman in the throes of a violently erotic dream. The 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 fantastic 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.

Fuseli 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 Surrealists 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).

Enjoy your week!