Fuseli, (John) Henry (1741-1825)

Swiss-born British Romantic artist. He painted macabre and dreamlike images, such as The Nightmare (1781; Institute of Arts, Detroit), which come close in feelings of horror and the unnatural to the English gothic novels of his day. His subjects include scenes from Milton and Shakespeare.

The son of a Swiss portrait painter, he emigrated to England 1764, and was encouraged by Reynolds to become a painter and study in Italy. The period spent there, 1770-78, made him a devotee of Michelangelo, though his own work depends for its interest on so different an element as the Romantic love of horror and fantasy. The Nightmare made him immediately famous, and the contributions to Boydell's ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ that followed gave further scope to his imagination. The sensation produced by the subject, rather than beauty of paint, was his main concern. Paintings and drawings of elongated female figures with exaggerated head-dresses in which there is a strain of erotic fancy form another aspect of his work. Witty, learned and an able writer, he appears in his later years, when Keeper of the Royal Academy, as an eccentric figure. He was the friend of Blake. He was also a perceptive critic, and translated Winckelmann's highly influential Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks.