Johann Heinrich Füssli
Painter of the nightmare.
Johann Heinrich Füssli moved from Switzerland to London. His The Nightmare, with a demon sitting on a sleeping woman, made him famous overnight.
Johann Heinrich Füssli was born in Zurich in 1741. His father was a painter who wrote about art, but he wanted his son to become a clergyman. Füssli was ordained, but after attacking a corrupt official in a pamphlet he was forced to leave the city. He travelled to Germany and in 1764 on to London, where he called himself Henry Fuseli. At first he worked as a translator and writer.
Joshua Reynolds encouraged him to become a painter. From 1770 to 1778 Fuseli lived in Rome, where he studied Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. He was struck by the powerful, contorted bodies. Back in London, in 1782 he exhibited The Nightmare at the Royal Academy. It shows a sleeping woman with a demon on her chest and a ghostly horse's head peering out from behind a curtain. The painting caused a sensation and was spread through engravings. The best-known version is in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Fuseli liked to take his subjects from Shakespeare, Milton, Dante and Norse mythology. He painted witches, spirits, madness and terror. The figures are elongated and muscular, the lighting theatrical and the colours dark. He also made uncanny, erotic drawings of women with fantastic hairstyles. He contributed to the publisher John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and later created his own Milton Gallery of pictures illustrating Milton's poetry.
In 1788 Fuseli married Sophia Rawlins, who was his model. He was a witty, sharp-tongued man and a friend of William Blake and, for a time, of the writer Mary Wollstonecraft. He became Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy and later Keeper of its schools, and was a respected teacher. He died in 1825 and was buried in St Paul's Cathedral.
Fuseli was a bridge between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. His interest in dreams and the unconscious made him a model for the Symbolists and Surrealists. The Nightmare has become one of the best-known images of terror in the history of art.