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ART & ARTISTS: Henry Fuselli

Henry Fuselli

Henry Fuseli, original name Johann Heinrich Füssli ,  (born February 7, 1741, Zürich, Switzerland—died April 16, 1825, Putney Hill, London, England), Swiss-born artist whose paintings are among the most dramatic, original, and sensual works of his time.

Fuseli was reared in an intellectual and artistic milieu and initially studied theology. Obliged to flee Zürich because of political entanglements, he went first to Berlin, and then settled in London in 1764. He was encouraged to become a painter by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and he left England in 1770 to study in Italy, where he stayed until 1778. During his stay in Rome he studied the works of Michelangelo and classical art, which became his major stylistic influences.

Fuseli is famous for his paintings and drawings of nude figures caught in strained and violent poses suggestive of intense emotion. He also had a penchant for inventing macabre fantasies, such as that in The Nightmare (1781). Always drawn to literary and theatrical subjects, Fuseli developed a special interest in illustrating Shakespeare. He was one of the original contributing artists to John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, for which he painted a number of works (1786–89). He had a noticeable influence on the style of his younger contemporary, William Blake.

SOURCE: Encyclopædia Britannica. (n.d.). Henry Fuseli. Britannica School. Retrieved February 17, 2022, from https://school.eb.com.au/levels/high/article/Henry-Fuseli/35713

Image: Wikipedia contributors. (2021, December 26). Henry Fuseli. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 01:59, February 17, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Henry_Fuseli&oldid=1062154586 

Henry Fuseli biography

Context of Fuseli's Art - Romanticism

Summary of romanticism – extract from Britannica

Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

In the 1760s and ’70s a number of British artists at home and in Rome, including James Barry, Henry Fuseli, John Hamilton Mortimer, and John Flaxman, began to paint subjects that were at odds with the strict decorum and classical historical and mythological subject matter of conventional figurative art. These artists favoured themes that were bizarre, pathetic, or extravagantly heroic, and they defined their images with tensely linear drawing and bold contrasts of light and shade.

Encyclopædia Britannica. (n.d.). Henry Fuseli. Britannica School. Retrieved January 22, 2022, from https://school.eb.com.au/levels/high/article/Henry-Fuseli/35713