Lot Essay
The subject for the present painting is taken from Book IV of Milton's Paradise Lost. Pursuing his evil schemes to seduce mankind from God and bring about their downfall, Satan slinks into the Garden of Eden, where he disguises himself as a toad and creeps up on Adam and Eve as they sleep. However, before he can taint 'the Organs of [Eve's] Fancy', he is seen by Ithuriel, one of the angelic guards entrusted with the safety of Paradise, who reveals him in his true guise:
'Him thus intent Ithuriel with his Spear
Touch'd lightly; for no falsehood can endure
Touch of Celestial temper, but returns
Of force to its own likeness: up he starts
Discover'd and surpris'd.' (Paradise Lost, IV, 810-814)
This masterly painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780 and subsequently remained untraced until its reappearance at auction in 1988 when purchased by Rudolf Nureyev. It represents Fuseli's earliest treatment on this scale of a Miltonic subject deliberately selected for its sublimity and the conceptual and technical challenges it posed. The painting is thus an important precursor to the 47 paintings illustrating the works of John Milton that the artist executed for his two Milton Gallery exhibitions in 1799 and 1800, and shares many of their characteristics, particularly the depiction of Satan as a powerful, almost heroic, figure. For example, the compositional motif of the coiling black and brown smoke in the mid-background of the present painting (emblematic of the exploding gunpowder in Milton's simile: 'As when a spark lights on a heap of nitrous Powder... With sudden blaze diffused, inflames the Air: So started up in his own shape the Fiend') reappears in at least two of the later Milton Gallery paintings, most notably Satan bursting from Chaos (Schiff, 1973, no. 893) and Odysseus between Scylla and Charybdis (op. cit., no. 894), both datable to c. 1794-1796 (where it represents the surging mass of uncreated matter in Chaos and the dark clouds veiling Scylla's lair). As for the heroicisation of Satan it should be remembered that the Romantics saw defiant Satan as a Promethean hero (for example, William Blake's assertion in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton 'was...of the Devil's party without knowing it'), although this interpretation flies in the face of Milton's consistent undercutting of Satan's character from the very beginning of Paradise Lost. At the same time, Fuseli's concept of Satan is flexible enough to allow him to meld heroic physique with physiognomical insight. Indeed, Fuseli's own judgment of the figure of Satan in Satan starting at the Touch of Ithuriel's Lance as an 'ideal [type of] Satan' ('Satansideal') (Fuseli in a letter to Johann Caspar Lavater, September 17, 1779; see Federmann, loc. cit.) is clearly justified by his depiction of Satan's powerful contradictory emotions ('passions') that 'dimm'd his face, Thrice chang'd with pale ire, envy, and despair' (Paradise Lost, IV, 114-115) on encountering God's new creation for the first time.
This ideal was 'diabolically cheapened' ('herabgeteufelt') by Johann Heinrich Lips in the plate of Satan's head (1779) for the French edition of Johann Caspar Lavater's Physiognomonie (1781-86, II, reproduced oppposite p. 255, pl. LXI), republished under Fuseli's supervision in English translation with re-engraved plates as Essays on Physiognomy (1789-98, 1810), but re-emerges in magnificent fashion in the oil sketch on paper of the head and torso of Satan (Private collection, formerly with Kate Ganz, London; see fig. 1). This expressive though unfinished study, previously assigned to c. 1790 but now dated to c. 1778, was once thought to have been cut out of painting no. 13 of the Milton Gallery, Adam and Eve observed by Satan for the First Time (Schiff, 1973, no. 1761), but it has since been convincingly identified by Kate Ganz as a full-scale study for the head of Satan in the present painting.
Fuseli's early and inteÿnse interest in this particular motif is also demonstrated by three virtually identical drawings from 1776 (National Gallery, Stockholm, British Museum, London, and The Cleveland Museum of Art) and a fourth slightly later distinct version preserved in the form of the outline engraving entitled Adam and Eve by Johann Heinrich Lips, c. 1806, published in Heinrich Fuseli's Saemmtliche Werke, 1807-1809 (see D. Weinglass, Prints and Engraved Illustrations By and After Henry Fuseli, A Catalogue Raisonné, 1994, p. 326, no. 283, illustrated p. 325), which was probably executed during the six months Fuseli spent in Zurich (September 1778 - April 1779) on his way back to London from Italy. All differ in detail from the finished painting.
Fuseli's 1776 drawings of Satan and Ithuriel also show a remarkable similarity to preliminary drawings executed by Alexander Runciman at Rome for his painting of the same subject, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1773, most notably in their depiction of 'the intertwining bodies of the two angels and the prostrate form of Adam and Eve, not to mention the general effects of light' (Pointon, op. cit., p. 113, pl. 102). Runciman's drawing may, therefore, have served as an inspiration for certain aspects of Fuseli's treatment of this subject.
Fuseli's enduring enthusiasm for the works of Milton was instilled in him at the Zurich Collegium by Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698-1783), who had translated Paradise Lost into German in 1732, and who also introduced him to the other great poets ('from Homer to Shakespeare', not omitting Dante and the Nibelungenlied) that became the staple of his pictorial world. But, when Fuseli went to London in 1764, he had not yet chosen between art and literature and still thought of himself as a man of letters. It was at the urging of Sir Joshua Reynolds that he finally accepted his destiny to be a painter and made the decision to study in Italy. His journey was made possible, above all, by the generous financial support of the banker Thomas Coutts, one of Fuseli's first and most important contacts in London. Among the many designs based on literary sources that he executed during his near-decade at Rome (1770-1778) is a very large body of work inspired by Shakespeare and some by Milton.
The present painting appears to have been started in London within a few months of Fuseli's return from Rome; he was certainly at work on it in late September 1779, when he informed Lavater that he was busy with the figure of Satan in his painting of Adam and Eve (Federmann, loc. cit.). The present painting was commissioned by Sir Robert Smyth, 5th Bart. (1744-1802) along with six other paintings, all of which eventually descended to Thomas George Graham White and were sold at Christie's, London, March 23, 1878. Fuseli had become acquainted with Smyth in Italy in 1778, and Smyth became an important patron of Fuseli's in the early 1780's. Indeed, in September 1780 the artist was forced to beg Smyth to send him money owed to him since his 'Stock of Subsistence [was] litteraly [sic] exhausted' (for Fuseli's letters to Smyth and a brief biographical account, see D. Weinglass, Collected English Letters of Henry Fuseli, 1982, pp. 19-20, 32 and 575-576).
Horace Walpole considered the present painting 'extravagant and ridiculous'; Anthony Pasquin, alias John Williams, echoed these sentiments at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1780 and castigated 'Satan' as 'the most ill looking devil I ever saw painted'. Undeterred, Fuseli reused the same composition some fifteen years later for an even larger painting, measuring 13 x 12 feet (396.2 x 365.7cm.), which he exhibited as part of the ill-fated Milton Gallery in 1799. The Milton Gallery picture was owned by John Angerstein but its present whereabouts are unknown; it was engraved in outline by Louis-Marie Normand (aka Normand fils) (1823). In 1802 Fuseli executed a third and considerably smaller version of the subject for Anker Smith's engraving in Du Roveray's edition of Paradise Lost of that year (the Ulrich collection, Zurich; oil on canvas, 91.4 x 71cm.; Schiff, 1973, no. 1212).
We are grateful to Professor David Weinglass, University of Missouri, Kansas City, for his assistance in preparing this entry. Professor Weinglass will publish the present painting in his expanded forthcoming catalogue raisonné on Johann Heinrich Fuseli, which is a revised, updated and English edition of the late Gert Schiff's 1973 two volume standard reference on the artist
'Him thus intent Ithuriel with his Spear
Touch'd lightly; for no falsehood can endure
Touch of Celestial temper, but returns
Of force to its own likeness: up he starts
Discover'd and surpris'd.' (Paradise Lost, IV, 810-814)
This masterly painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780 and subsequently remained untraced until its reappearance at auction in 1988 when purchased by Rudolf Nureyev. It represents Fuseli's earliest treatment on this scale of a Miltonic subject deliberately selected for its sublimity and the conceptual and technical challenges it posed. The painting is thus an important precursor to the 47 paintings illustrating the works of John Milton that the artist executed for his two Milton Gallery exhibitions in 1799 and 1800, and shares many of their characteristics, particularly the depiction of Satan as a powerful, almost heroic, figure. For example, the compositional motif of the coiling black and brown smoke in the mid-background of the present painting (emblematic of the exploding gunpowder in Milton's simile: 'As when a spark lights on a heap of nitrous Powder... With sudden blaze diffused, inflames the Air: So started up in his own shape the Fiend') reappears in at least two of the later Milton Gallery paintings, most notably Satan bursting from Chaos (Schiff, 1973, no. 893) and Odysseus between Scylla and Charybdis (op. cit., no. 894), both datable to c. 1794-1796 (where it represents the surging mass of uncreated matter in Chaos and the dark clouds veiling Scylla's lair). As for the heroicisation of Satan it should be remembered that the Romantics saw defiant Satan as a Promethean hero (for example, William Blake's assertion in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton 'was...of the Devil's party without knowing it'), although this interpretation flies in the face of Milton's consistent undercutting of Satan's character from the very beginning of Paradise Lost. At the same time, Fuseli's concept of Satan is flexible enough to allow him to meld heroic physique with physiognomical insight. Indeed, Fuseli's own judgment of the figure of Satan in Satan starting at the Touch of Ithuriel's Lance as an 'ideal [type of] Satan' ('Satansideal') (Fuseli in a letter to Johann Caspar Lavater, September 17, 1779; see Federmann, loc. cit.) is clearly justified by his depiction of Satan's powerful contradictory emotions ('passions') that 'dimm'd his face, Thrice chang'd with pale ire, envy, and despair' (Paradise Lost, IV, 114-115) on encountering God's new creation for the first time.
This ideal was 'diabolically cheapened' ('herabgeteufelt') by Johann Heinrich Lips in the plate of Satan's head (1779) for the French edition of Johann Caspar Lavater's Physiognomonie (1781-86, II, reproduced oppposite p. 255, pl. LXI), republished under Fuseli's supervision in English translation with re-engraved plates as Essays on Physiognomy (1789-98, 1810), but re-emerges in magnificent fashion in the oil sketch on paper of the head and torso of Satan (Private collection, formerly with Kate Ganz, London; see fig. 1). This expressive though unfinished study, previously assigned to c. 1790 but now dated to c. 1778, was once thought to have been cut out of painting no. 13 of the Milton Gallery, Adam and Eve observed by Satan for the First Time (Schiff, 1973, no. 1761), but it has since been convincingly identified by Kate Ganz as a full-scale study for the head of Satan in the present painting.
Fuseli's early and inteÿnse interest in this particular motif is also demonstrated by three virtually identical drawings from 1776 (National Gallery, Stockholm, British Museum, London, and The Cleveland Museum of Art) and a fourth slightly later distinct version preserved in the form of the outline engraving entitled Adam and Eve by Johann Heinrich Lips, c. 1806, published in Heinrich Fuseli's Saemmtliche Werke, 1807-1809 (see D. Weinglass, Prints and Engraved Illustrations By and After Henry Fuseli, A Catalogue Raisonné, 1994, p. 326, no. 283, illustrated p. 325), which was probably executed during the six months Fuseli spent in Zurich (September 1778 - April 1779) on his way back to London from Italy. All differ in detail from the finished painting.
Fuseli's 1776 drawings of Satan and Ithuriel also show a remarkable similarity to preliminary drawings executed by Alexander Runciman at Rome for his painting of the same subject, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1773, most notably in their depiction of 'the intertwining bodies of the two angels and the prostrate form of Adam and Eve, not to mention the general effects of light' (Pointon, op. cit., p. 113, pl. 102). Runciman's drawing may, therefore, have served as an inspiration for certain aspects of Fuseli's treatment of this subject.
Fuseli's enduring enthusiasm for the works of Milton was instilled in him at the Zurich Collegium by Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698-1783), who had translated Paradise Lost into German in 1732, and who also introduced him to the other great poets ('from Homer to Shakespeare', not omitting Dante and the Nibelungenlied) that became the staple of his pictorial world. But, when Fuseli went to London in 1764, he had not yet chosen between art and literature and still thought of himself as a man of letters. It was at the urging of Sir Joshua Reynolds that he finally accepted his destiny to be a painter and made the decision to study in Italy. His journey was made possible, above all, by the generous financial support of the banker Thomas Coutts, one of Fuseli's first and most important contacts in London. Among the many designs based on literary sources that he executed during his near-decade at Rome (1770-1778) is a very large body of work inspired by Shakespeare and some by Milton.
The present painting appears to have been started in London within a few months of Fuseli's return from Rome; he was certainly at work on it in late September 1779, when he informed Lavater that he was busy with the figure of Satan in his painting of Adam and Eve (Federmann, loc. cit.). The present painting was commissioned by Sir Robert Smyth, 5th Bart. (1744-1802) along with six other paintings, all of which eventually descended to Thomas George Graham White and were sold at Christie's, London, March 23, 1878. Fuseli had become acquainted with Smyth in Italy in 1778, and Smyth became an important patron of Fuseli's in the early 1780's. Indeed, in September 1780 the artist was forced to beg Smyth to send him money owed to him since his 'Stock of Subsistence [was] litteraly [sic] exhausted' (for Fuseli's letters to Smyth and a brief biographical account, see D. Weinglass, Collected English Letters of Henry Fuseli, 1982, pp. 19-20, 32 and 575-576).
Horace Walpole considered the present painting 'extravagant and ridiculous'; Anthony Pasquin, alias John Williams, echoed these sentiments at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1780 and castigated 'Satan' as 'the most ill looking devil I ever saw painted'. Undeterred, Fuseli reused the same composition some fifteen years later for an even larger painting, measuring 13 x 12 feet (396.2 x 365.7cm.), which he exhibited as part of the ill-fated Milton Gallery in 1799. The Milton Gallery picture was owned by John Angerstein but its present whereabouts are unknown; it was engraved in outline by Louis-Marie Normand (aka Normand fils) (1823). In 1802 Fuseli executed a third and considerably smaller version of the subject for Anker Smith's engraving in Du Roveray's edition of Paradise Lost of that year (the Ulrich collection, Zurich; oil on canvas, 91.4 x 71cm.; Schiff, 1973, no. 1212).
We are grateful to Professor David Weinglass, University of Missouri, Kansas City, for his assistance in preparing this entry. Professor Weinglass will publish the present painting in his expanded forthcoming catalogue raisonné on Johann Heinrich Fuseli, which is a revised, updated and English edition of the late Gert Schiff's 1973 two volume standard reference on the artist