Johann Heinrich Füssli, known in England as Henry Fuseli, was born in Zurich in February 1741, the second of 18 children. His father, Johann Caspar Füssli, was a painter of portraits and landscapes. The young Füssli first studied theology and was ordained a minister in 1761. Yet he turned to art and literature, and settled in London in the mid-1760s. There the painter Joshua Reynolds, later the first president of the Royal Academy, noticed his drawings: he advised him to devote himself to painting and to go to Italy.
Success came with The Nightmare (1781). It shows a sleeping young woman tormented by a demonic incubus. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782, the painting caused a sensation and shocked the critics. Füssli went on to paint several versions; the first has been held by the Detroit Institute of Arts since 1955. The image has been copied and imitated so many times that it is now part of our shared imagination.
Füssli drew on a vast literary repertoire: Greek mythology, Norse legends, the Bible, English and German folklore, Shakespeare and Milton. He painted for the publisher John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, then created his own Milton Gallery: 47 paintings, many of them very large, which the public nevertheless shunned. He became a member of the Royal Academy in 1790, with Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent as his diploma work. He later became its Professor of Painting, then its Keeper.
Füssli died in April 1825 at Putney Hill, near London, aged 84. His style strongly influenced young British artists, William Blake in particular. He remains one of the great pioneers of dark Romanticism and the Gothic imagination.
