Thursday, November 9, 2017

Henry Fuseli's Roman Album at the British Museum (part II)

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Battle of the Standard, after Leonardo da Vinci
1777
drawing
British Museum

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Danaë, after Polidoro da Caravaggio
1775
drawing
British Museum

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Dead Christ, after Enea Vico
1770-78
drawing
British Museum

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Ignudo from the Sistine Ceiling, after Michelangelo
1777
drawing
British Museum

"Fuseli was born in Zurich on 6 February 1741, the second son of the five children of Johann Caspar Füseli and Elisabeth Waser.  Although educated as a theologian and ordained as a Zwinglian minister in 1761, Fuseli pursued a wide range of humanist studies, developing an enthusiasm for classical philology under the influence of Johann Jakob Breitlinger, and becoming proficient in English, French, and Italian.  He was introduced by Johann Jakob Bodmer, the mentor whom he most revered, to the Nibelungenlied, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, later the principal sources of his art.  His associations with the Sturm and Drang movement were close.  Forced, with Lavater, to leave Zurich in 1763 after publishing a pamphlet critical of the administration, he traveled in Germany, England,  and France, embarking on a literary career."

"Encouraged by Reynolds in 1768 to become a painter, Fuseli traveled to Italy in 1770 in the company of John Armstrong.  He sought inspiration from classical sculpture, Michelangelo, and Mannerist art, and, befriended by the Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel, became the leading spirit of a group of innovative young artists.  Returning to London in 1780, Fuseli established his reputation with The Nightmare.  . . ."

Henry Fuseli
Incubus from Fuseli's painting The Nightmare
2006
Badge sold at the Tate Gallery Gift Shop
plastic, paper, metal
British Museum

"Fuseli's relationships with and attitude to women were highly important for his art.  His most passionate love was for Anna Landolt, a niece of Lavater, whom he met in Zurich in 1778; but her father refused his suit.  He married in 1788 Sophia Rawlins, an attractive young model obsessed with hair and fashion, who was socially and intellectually his inferior; there were no children, but she appears to have satisfied her husband's fetishistic and other desires.  Mary Wollstonecraft's passion for him in 1792 was firmly put down by Mrs. Fuseli.  Fuseli died suddenly on 16 April 1825, at the home on Putney Hill of Coutt's daughter, Lady Guilford, and was buried in Saint Paul's Cathedral, London."

 John Hayes, from British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries: the Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue, Washington DC, 1992 

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Roman Scene
1771
drawing
British Museum

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Pastoral Scene
1777-78
drawing
British Museum

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Pastoral Scene
1777-78
drawing
British Museum

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Unidentified Scene
ca. 1770-78
drawing
British Museum

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Unidentified Scene
1778-80
drawing
British Museum

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Torso
1770-78
drawing
British Museum

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Figure Study
1777-78
drawing
British Museum

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Figure Study
1776-78
drawing
British Museum

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Figure Study
1770-78
drawing
British Museum

Henry Fuseli
Roman Album
Profile, possibly Self-portrait
ca. 1770-78
drawing
British Museum