Henry Fuseli

Johann Heinrich Füssli, known in Britain as Henry Fuseli, was a Swiss-born draughtsman, painter and writer on art who spent most of his career in England. Living from 1741 to 1825, he straddled the late Enlightenment and early Romanticism, and he matters because his images of the supernatural and the irrational anticipated sensibilities that came later. He wrote fluently in French, Italian, English and German, though he preferred German for his own thinking.

The son of a portrait and landscape painter, he studied with a classical curriculum at the Carolinum in Zurich and at first was destined for the church. After being forced to leave Switzerland following a political affair, he passed through Germany and reached England in 1765. On the advice of Joshua Reynolds, he committed himself fully to art. From 1770 to 1778 he lived in Rome, where he developed a dramatic Mannerism with classical roots, shaped by Michelangelo. Back in London he worked for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and later assembled his own Milton Gallery of forty-seven paintings, a commercial failure that closed in 1800.

His work, drawn mostly from literature and the supernatural, shows exaggerated bodies in twisted poses and a strongly theatrical sense of staging. He painted more than two hundred pictures but exhibited only a few. His most famous work, The Nightmare, caused a sensation when it was shown in 1782. He served as Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy, and his pupils included David Wilkie and Edwin Landseer. His style influenced William Blake, and in the twentieth century Expressionists and Surrealists claimed him as a precursor, after a period of relative neglect following his death.