Henry Fuseli

Percival Delivering Belisane from the Enchantment of Urma

exhibited 1783

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Not on display
Artist
Henry Fuseli 1741–1825
Medium
Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions
Support: 991 x 1257 mm
frame: 1248 x 1510 x 108 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Presented by the Art Fund 1941
Reference
N05304

Display caption

Conventionally, history paintings were based on a literary or historical source familiar to educated viewers. The artist’s role was to select from the story a crucially significant moment that would convey a sense of nobility and moral certainty.

The success of this strategy of course depended on the viewer knowing the story, and so knowing what would happen next. Fuseli, however, admitted that he invented the saga of Percival and Belisane shown here. His paintings tended to emphasis spectacle and sensation rather then the noble themes and moral lessons which Reynolds’s view of the ‘great style’ demanded.

Gallery label, September 2004

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Romanticism

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Henry Fuseli, ‘Siegfried about to Deny on Oath that Brunhild Had Been his Paramour. Verso: The Figures Traced Through’ 1805

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date not known

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John Hamilton Mortimer, ‘II. The Hero’s Father Blesses his Departure’ exhibited 1775

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Charles Reuben Ryley, ‘Oscar Bringing Back Annir’s Daughter’ 1785

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1785
Henry Fuseli, ‘Charis Phykomené. Verso: Head of a Woman, Unfinished’ 1791

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1791
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date not known
Henry Fuseli, ‘The Debutante’ 1807

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1807

Robert Smirke The Afflicted Matron, the Countess Trifaldi, from ‘Don Quixote’

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James Barry, ‘King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia’ 1786–8

James Barry King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia

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