Henry Fuseli (1741-1825)
Born Johann Heinrich Füssli, Swiss history painter and writer, based permanently in England from 1779.

Fuseli was born in Zurich into a family of painters and art historians. Although his siblings pursued artistic careers, he was persuaded to study theology. He was trained as a Zwinglian (Protestant) priest in Zurich, but after protesting against the corruption of a local politician was advised to leave Switzerland. Fuseli travelled around Germany in 1763-4, before moving to London. Here he worked as a translator, writer and illustrator, gaining a reputation as a passionate follower of the radical philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). By 1770 he had raised the funds to travel to Italy to pursue a career as a painter. He spent the years 1770-78 in Rome, at the heart of a dynamic international community of younger artists.

In 1777 he exhibited a massive painting of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the Royal Academy, and followed this up on returning to London in 1779 with a series of pictures which secured his reputation as a painter of imaginative subjects. Around this time he met the Liverpool lawyer and writer William Roscoe (1753- 1831), who became his most constant patron. At the end of the 1780s he was employed by John Boydell (1719-1804), Thomas Macklin (1760-1800) and James Woodmason (d.1831) to paint literary subjects for their commercial galleries. His fame increased and, recently married, he was spurred to seek formal recognition. In 1790 he was elected a Royal Academician. During the 1790s Fuseli was preoccupied with creating a series of heroically-proportioned canvases for a one-man Milton Gallery. This opened in 1799 and re-opened in 1800, but was a complete flop. Nonetheless, Fuseli’s institutional career progressed rapidly; he was made Professor of Painting in 1799, then Keeper in 1804. In these capacities Fuseli dominated the basic training of a whole generation of artists, including such improbable figures as Turner (1775-1851) and Constable (1776-1837). He was, though, a notoriously eccentric teacher. His extensive writings on art were compiled by his friend John Knowles (1781-1841) in 1831.

He continued to work until the end, and attracted the support of a few wealthy collectors. Fuseli’s reputation as a painter in oils was uneven, and plummeted after his death. His drawings, however, still attracted admiration and his eccentricities became the stuff of legend. His work was reappraised in Switzerland and then in Britain in the early twentieth century, when it was seen as anticipating the Surrealist and Expressionist tendencies within modern art.