Fuseli, Henry

Abstract

The Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) made a mark on the Romantic cultural scene as a painter of dreams and the supernatural. His style became so recognizable that ‘the fuse‐lesque’ came to stand for sensational themes such as his most iconic image of The Night‐Mare (1782). In 1794 Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that he would write ‘a fine subject for a wild Ode … when I am in a Humour to abandon myself to all the Diableries, that ever met the Eye of a Fuseli!’ (Cal` 2006: 168). Fuseli's sublime shock tactics and a strong Michelangelesque style exercised reviewers uncertain whether to place the wild Swiss genius in the domain of the sublime, the incongruous or the ridiculous. He was known as the ‘poets’ painter’ for an ambitious programme of poetical paintings that brought literature to the exhibition room and subsequently made him a key figure in the literary gallery phenomenon: he produced work for Thomas Macklin's Gallery of Poets (1788–1800) and the Bible (1790–1800), John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery (1789–1805), Robert Bowyer's Historic Gallery (1792–1806), and went on to exhibit at his own short‐lived Milton Gallery (1799–1800). These initiatives placed literature at the intersection between the book and the art market. While Fuseli's literary programme could only be achieved in the commercial galleries of Pall Mall, it nonetheless gained him the recognition of a distinguished career at the Royal Academy. Moreover, Fuseli's intellectual ambition as a writer and editor made him a regular at the social gatherings of the publisher Joseph Johnson and the Analytical Review , bringing him into contact with a world of dissenters and radicals such as Tom Paine, Joseph Priestley, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Fuseli's relationship with Wollstonecraft culminated in 1792 when she was working on Vindications of the Rights of Woman and he was launching the first number of the Milton Gallery. William Godwin's account of Wollstonecraft's ‘personal and ardent affection’ for Fuseli in Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798: 85–91, 97–99) made him a target of counter‐revolutionary propaganda, which saw them as emblematic of ‘Jacobin morality’ and styled Fuseli a Rousseauvian ‘enemy to civilized society and existing establishments’. Yet this picture failed to undermine Fuseli's place at the Royal Academy, where he was appointed Professor of Painting in 1799 and Keeper in 1804.