Henry Fuseli
Nationality: Swiss
Born: 1741-02-06, Zurich, Switzerland
Died: 1825-04-16

Fuessly, Heinrich, or as he is commonly known in England, Henry Fuseli, second son of Johann Kaspar Fuessly, was born at Zurch in 1741. He was originally intended for the Church, and actually entered it, but compelled by the enmity of a magistrate, whose dishonesty he had exposed, to leave his native town, he went to Berlin, and for some time devoted himself to literature, in which he was engaged at intervals throughout his life. In 1765, at the instigation of the British ambassador at the court of Berlin, he visited England, and in 1767 an introduction to Reynolds, who praised his drawings, induced him to become a painter, and in the following year he went to Italy, where he stayed for nearly nine years, studying the works of Michelangelo; but he never fairly mastered the principles of drawing or colouring and his works are esteemed more for the powerful imagination they display than for any artistic merit. He was of most eccentric habits and extravagant ideas, and these ideas are everywhere apparent in his pictures. Leaving Italy in 1778, and passing through Zurich, he reached England in the following year, and in 1782 produced his famous picture "The Nightmare."

In 1786 he became a zealous worker in Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, for which he executed nine paintings. In 1788 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, and an Academician two years later, and in 1790, too, he married one of his models. In 1799 he opened his Milton Gallery, comprising forty-seven paintings, the result of several years of labour. In the same year he was elected Lecturer on Painting at the Royal Academy, and in 1804 he was made keeper, the bye-laws being altered to allow him to retain the lectureship. He died at Putney in 1825. Fuseli was an artist in mind, but devoid of technical knowledge. His most famous productions are, perhaps, his illustrations to Shakespeare.

Source: Williamson, George C. "Fuessly, Heinrich," Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Vol 2. London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd, 1926.