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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Relief with Roman banquet, from Villa Pamphili 1770 drawing British Museum |
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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Relief with Bacchus, from Villa Albani 1770 drawing British Museum |
"Joshua Reynolds encouraged Fuseli to concentrate on painting and to study in Italy. Fuseli's journey was funded by the banker Thomas Coutts and some Swiss friends. The British Museum acquired an album from this trip always described as 'The Roman Album' although the drawings are all now mounted individually. They were made, with a few possible exceptions, during his stay in Rome, which lasted 8 years, 1770-78. He only left Rome on two occasions; to Venice in 1772, to recuperate from fever, and to Naples in 1775. In Rome he immersed himself in Michelangelo's work particularly and was the centre of a group of artists including Thomas Banks, George Romney, John Brown and several European artists. On his return he moved in slightly radical circles and met Blake and Mary Wollstonecraft. He contributed to Boydell's 'Shakespeare Gallery' from 1786 and opened his own 'Milton Gallery' 1799-1800. He was made a full Royal Academician in 1790, and was Professor of Painting from 1799-1805 and again from 1810."
"From the outset Fuseli's art proceeded from drawings, and most of its formal, tonal and iconographical characteristics were first worked out on paper. He had no academic or conventional training as a painter and was in effect self-taught; many of his canvases have deteriorated badly as a result of faulty or experimental techniques."
"The style Fuseli developed in Rome, fusing a linear and compositional discipline of Roman relief sculpture with the expressive renderings of the human form by Michelangelo, after being captivated by his Sistine ceiling frescoes, can be seen even in his early drawings in the Roman Album. . . . Fuseli's paintings were based on passages from Dante, Milton, Aeschylus, Homer and especially Shakespeare. Whilst the compositions were designed around the scenes from these writings, the figures were often dependent upon the figural studies made in the Roman albums."
– curator's notes from the British Museum
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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Satyr and Nymph, sculpture group from front and back 1772-78 drawing British Museum |
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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Legend of King Tarchetios, from Plutarch's Romulus 1770-78 drawing British Museum |
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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Meleager, from the Iliad 1776-78 drawing British Museum |
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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Achilles lamenting Patroclus, from the Iliad 1770 drawing British Museum |
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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Perseus rescuing Andromeda 1778-80 drawing British Museum |
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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Roman relief, Draped woman 1770-78 drawing British Museum |
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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Relief with Zethos, Antiope, Amphion from Villa Albani 1770 drawing British Museum |
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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Death of Gaius Graccus, from Plutarch ca. 1776 drawing British Museum |
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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Death of Gaius Graccus, from Plutarch ca. 1776 drawing British Museum |
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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Death of Ajax, from Sophocles 1772 drawing British Museum |
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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Oedipus and the Sphinx, from Sophocles 1770-72 drawing British Museum |
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| Henry Fuseli Roman Album Roman relief, possibly Weeping Dacia ca. 1777 drawing British Museum |