Johann Heinrich Füssli, Henry Fuseli, R.A. (1741-1825)

INTRODUCTION The appearance of an album containing well over fifty hitherto unknown drawings by Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) is a major event, especially when the collection covers nearly every aspect of Fuseli's career and subject matter. The fact that the album was assembled by a member of a family closely associated with the artist for three generations gives it particular interest. Fuseli's art is one of the most extraordinary manifestations of the transition from 18th Century classicism to 19th romanticism. In part this reflects his international background; born and brough up in Switzerland (hence the original form of his name, Johann Heinrich Füssli) but living most of this life in London, he also spent nearly a year in Germany and a crucial period of over eight years in Italy. The imaginative extravagance of his art may also be the result of his wide interests in other fields; his career as an artist came after two false starts, as a Zwinglian minister and as a man of letters. Fuseli was born in Zurich on 6 February 1741, the son of a minor painter who was, however, part of an intellectual circle that included Salomon Gessner, Klopstock and Wieland, and , through correspondence, Mengs and Winckelmann. At the Zurich Collegium Fuseli studied under Bodmer and became a lifelong friend of Lavater, with whom he was ordained in the Zwinglian church in 1791. He also became proficient in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Italian and English; in old age he was to remark that 'I always think in the language in which I write, and it is a matter of indifference to me whether it be in English, French or Italian;I know each equally well; but if I wish to express myself with power, it must be in German'. In 1762 Fuseli and Lavater, together with Felix Hess, published an attack on the local magistrate and were advised to leave Switzerland, which they did the next year, setting off for Berlin. Fuseli lived mainly by doing literary translations and met a number of leading German writers; in 1764 he left for London, largely to act as a contact with their counterparts in England. The same year he wrote an ode to Bodner and in 1765 translated Winckelmann into English. Following a visit to France as tutor to Lord Waldegrave's son in 1765, when he met Jean Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, he published his critical Remarks on the Writings and Conduct of J.J. Rousseau, 1767, in which he broke with convention and advocated the total separation of art and morals. Although Fuseli had begun to draw at the age of ten he had so far mainly expressed himself in his writings. In England however, probably through his involvement with two founder-members of the Royal Academy of Swiss origin, he met Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President, who encouraged him to concentrate on painting as a career. Backed by Thomas Coutts the banker and by friends in Switzerland, he set off to study in Italy in 1770, settling in Rome, where with relatively short intervals in Venice and Naples, he remained until 1778. Despite his upbringing he was totally disillusioned over Winckelmann and his protégé Mengs who 'was not worthy of the name he [Winckelmann] gave him'; indeed he turned to the study of classical art and Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. According to Allan Cunningham, in his Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters. 'It was a story he loved to repeat, how he lay on his back day after day, and week succeeding week, with upturned and wondering eyes, musing at the splendid ceiling of the Sistine chapel - on the unattainable grandeur of the Florentine ... He fulfilled the injunction of Reynolds - he ate and drank and slept and waked upon Michelangel'. He soon became the centre of an international group of young artists including Sergel, Thomas Banks, Abildgaard, Romney and John Brown. On his way back to London Fuseli stayed in Zurich for the last time, visiting his family and friends, flirting with Magdalena Hess and having a love affair with Anna Landhold who was engaged to another. In London he resumed contact with such patrons as Thomas Coutts and made further such contacts in William Lock of Norbury and William Roscoe of Liverpool. He also frequented the more radical circle of the publisher Joseph Johnson, through whom he met Mary Wolstonecraft and William Blake. In the first half of the 1780s he had a number of successes at the Royal Academy with such pictures as The Nightmare, Macbeth and the Three Witches and Lady Macbeth sleepwalking and this led to his election as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1788. He became a full Academician in 1790, Professor of Painting from 1789 until 1805 and again from 1810, and Keeper from 1804. From 1786 Fuseli contributed to John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, an enterprise involving the exhibition and sale of specially commissioned paintings combined with their disseminating through a publication and separate engravings. This led to Fuseli painting all the pictures for his own Milton Gallery, opened to the public in 1799 and 1800. Unfortunately economic factors, largely the result of the war with France, led both to financial disaster. In 1802, during the short-lived peace, Fuseli went to tour Paris with the painter and diarist Joseph Farington and others; partly in consequence of this visit he played a leading part in the Greek revival during the decade after his return. Through his position at the Royal Academy he taught such varied later masters as Haydon, Wilkie, Landseer, Etty, Mulready, Linnell and Leslie, as well as attracting such close followers of his style as Theodor Von Holst and T.G. Wainewright. On 16 April 1825 he died at the home on Putney Hill of one of his most important patrons, the Countess of Guildford, a member of the Coutts family. He was buried in St. Paul's. The newly discovered collection of drawings was assembled by a member of another family with which Fuseli was closely associated, the Moores. Inscribed inside the cover of the album in which these drawings were mounted in the name 'Harriet J Moore'. She was a daughter of James Moore (later, Carrick-Moore) and the granddaughter of Dr. John Moore, M.D. (1729-1802), family physician to William Lock of Norbury at one of whose family gatherings Fuseli may have met him in the 1780s, though they may already have been acquainted during Fuseli's Roman years, when Moore was also in Italy with the Duke of Hamilton. Dr. Moore's sons included the famous General Sir John Moore (1761-1809), who died at Corunna during the Peninsular Wars, and Admiral Graham Moore (1764-1843), but Fuseli was closest to the second son James (1762-1860), who took the additional name of Carrick on inheriting a fortune in 1821. James went to Paris with Fuseli on his visit in 1802, though he had to return early (his room was taken by Robert Smirke). He too was a doctor and there is a dramatic account of how, in December 1809, Fuseli met him by chance in the street and rushed him to see if he could cure the dying Joseph Johnson; later, in a letter of 1823, answering some complaint by Fuseli about his medicine, he told him to 'swallow it all'. They also corresponded over the monument to Sir John Moore after his death in 1809 and, when James left London to live in Scotland in 1822, Fuseli railed at his self-banishment and the loss of his close presence. James owned a version of Fuseli's Sleeping Shepherd and Shepherdess, an illustration to Milton's Lysidas, and it was a picture that he had commissioned, Lady Constance, Arthur and Salisbury, from Shakepseare's King John, that was on Fuseli's easel when he died. When John Knowles assembled information for his life of Fuseli, John Moore was able to be of considerable help. James Moore married Harriet Henderson, sister of the actor John Henderson, in 1799 and they had three daughters and two sons, Harriet Jane (1801-1884), the owner of these drawing, Louise (1802-1853), Julia (1803-1904), John (1805-1898), and Graham Francis, who took the name G. Michel Esmeade (1806-1883). Fuseli's closeness to the family is reflected in his letters to Mrs Moore. In one he asks her to 'Kiss my Harriet for me', and on another occasion he sends 'a volley of kisses for Harriet, Julia and Louise and a long Etcetera'. Harriet, the eldest daughter seems to have been a particular favourite. On 22 November 1806 he inscribed a copy of his friend William Blake's For Children: The Gates of Paradise to the five-year old girl. Like her sisters, she never married. Harriet owned a number of works by Fuseli apart from those in this collection. One was the large oil painting of Titania and Bottom, painted for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in the 1780s and now in the Tate Gallery. She also owned another album of drawings, the Roman Album now in the British Museum, and a further album of drawings and prints by Fuseli and other artists that was sold in these Rooms on 6 March 1973. The painting and the Roman Album passed to Harriet's long-lived youngest sister Julia, the other album to a distant relative. The pages of the album described in this catalogue are watermarked 'SMITH & ALLNUTT 1837', so it is clear that the drawings were not actually stuck into it until after that date. However, three of the drawing, all of young girls (lots ..., ..., ... ), were given directly to Harriet by the artist who died when she was in her early twenties: the page in the album on which these drawings were mounted is inscribed in her hand 'Given to me by Mr Fuseli'. Other pages in the album also bear inscriptions by Harriet Moore giving the previous owners of her drawings. One drawing, formerly on a page annotated 'Purchased at Mr Knowles's sale', can be traced in the sale of Fuseli's executor and biographer John Knowles, held in these Rooms on 22 April 1847 ( see lot ...). Other drawings were endorsed by Harriet Moore 'Sir Harry Englefield's', that is, Sir Henry Englefield, Bart., a friend and correspondent of Fuseli (see lots ..., ..., ...). One drawing is annotated 'Given to me by Mr Jones'; there are a number of possible identifications (see lot ...). More tantalising is the note 'Mrs Wainwright's' written under the largest group of drawings for which a previous owner is given (lots ... , q.v., ); despite the minor difference in spelling she could well be the wife of the notorious poisoner and forger Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, a great admirer of Fuseli whose works he both immitated and praised in reviews signed 'James Weathercock'. A drawing removed from the album on some previous occasion was also annotated by Harriet Moore on the now empty album page, in ink rather than the pencil of the other inscriptions and at the end of the series of annotated drawings, 'from Sir Thomas Lawrence's Collection - bought at Woodburn's sale'; this took place at Christie's on 4 June 1860 when lot 406 consisted of two drawings by Fuseli, bought by Miss Moore, described as 'Ariel on the bat's wing' and 'a study of man standing' (the latter fits a drawing in the album sold in 1973, so the work from this album was presumably that depicting Ariel). The drawings from Harriet Moore's album cover most of Fuseli's career and a wide range of subjects. What seems to be the earliest, dating from the beginning of Fuseli's years in Rome or even from slightly earlier, and possibly illustrating Shakespeare's Richard III, (lot ... ), is still a bit immature with the somewhat caricatured, unintentinally comic features but it already anticipates Fuseli's masterly use of light and shade. This is seen at it's most accomplished in Macbeth and the Armed Head (lot ...) which definately dates from the artist's Roman period. Other works from these years include the dramatic pen drawing of The Massacre of the Innocents (lot ...) and a group of frieze-like drawings of figures and groups of figures largely derived, closely or not so closely, from Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel (lots ...). Also from this period are drawings after Antique statues in Rome and Florence, including the famous Dioscuri and Farnese Hercules (lots ..., ...), as well as drawings after Renaissance and more recent works (lots pp. 37, 42, 43). The influence of Michelangelo remained long after Fuseli left Rome and returned to England, as in a group of bold ink drawing some of which are dated 1789 (lots 22, 24, 25, 35). Dating from the later, English years there are also further fully developed composition sketches illustrating Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, Shakespeare's Twelth Night and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (lots ... ... ... ... ). There is also a group of life studies and other drawings including a magnificent figure identified as Satan, seen in idealised form as only Fuseli or his friend William Blake would show him (lot ...). There are two exquisite studies of embracing lovers, mysteriously related by Fuseli to the love of Siegfried and Kriemhild in the nibelungenlied (lots ... and ...). Finally, there is an extensive group of portrait drawings in which Fuseli's perception of feminine beauty, at first that of his wife, later of such young girls as Lavinia de Irujo, merges with his fetishistic preoccupation with fantastically coiffeured hair (lots ...) The following abbreviations are used throughout this catalogue: Powell 1951: Nicholas Powell, The Drawings of Henry Fuseli 1951 Tomory 1972: Peter Tomory, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli, 1972 Schiff 1973 and S.: Gert Schiff, Johann Heinrich Füssli 1741- 1825, 1973, and the catalogue numbers in that publication which, in the majority of cases, is also the number of a reproduction Weinglass 1982:David H. Weinglass, The Collected English Letters of Henry Fuseli, 1982 We are indebted for assistance in cataloguing these works to Professor David H. Weinglass, who is preparing the updated, English language edition of Gert Schiff's 1973, monograph for publication by Yale University Press next year.

Details

Johann Heinrich Füssli, Henry Fuseli, R.A. (1741-1825)

A young Woman with an elaborate Hairstyle

inscribed 'William Ross, for/admission to copy in/the School of Painting/F'; pencil
5 x 4in. (125 x 95mm.)

Provenance

Given by the artist to Miss Moore (according to her inscription on the album page)

Lot Essay

This drawing, together with lots ... and ..., was on a page in Miss Moore's album inscribed by her 'Given to me by M^r Fuseli'. This is typical of many drawings by Fuseli of girls with highly elaborate hairstyle, whether from the life or at least in part fanciful it is difficult to establish; see in particular S.1685, dated by Schiff to
1818. The sitter could just possibly be Harriet Mellon, see lot p. 12 (B)

The note on the back is by an amanuensis but is signed by Fuseli as keeper of the Royal Academy. The William Ross being given permission to copy in the Academy Schools is presumably the miniature painter of that name, later Sir William Rose (1794-1860), who entered the Academy Schools in November 1815 having already started to exhibit miniatures
at the Academy as 'Master William Ross' in 1809; his father, also William and also a miniature painter, exhibited at the Academy between 1809 and 1825

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