Lot Essay
From childhood Fuseli was intended to enter the Church. In the spring of 1761 he with Johann Kaspar Lavater, already his closest friend, were ordained into the Zwinglian ministry (Veri Domini Ministri). This career was short-lived: in 1762 Fuseli and Lavater issued together a pamphlet attacking the injustice of the local magistrate, Grebel, and managed to escape the ensuing scandal by leaving Zurich in 1763. They went to Berlin where Fuseli met the British minister Sir Andrew Mitchell, whom he accompanied to England the following year.
The present drawing dates from that precise period of tension with the Church. Fuseli has taken as the text of his inaugural sermon a text from the Bible, Acts XVII, 18: 'What on earth does this babbler mean?' A parallel with the present self-portrait was suggested by Schiff: 'The best place to begin is with Fuseli's small self-portrait dating from his short time in Holy Orders (1761-2). He shows himself thinking of a sermon with remarkable irony: wearing a dressing-gown, a night-cap and with a large pipe, here he is as a young clergyman enjoying the comforts of his stipend: but his bearing and expression are the ones of a stubborn reverie which reveals that his occupation is a jest. It exposes the holy profession as a charade which he is acting out as a practical joke, while his thoughts and convictions are meanwhile elsewhere. We are reminded of that self-mockery of the text for his inaugural sermon', G. Schiff, op. cit., p. 58.
The present drawing dates from that precise period of tension with the Church. Fuseli has taken as the text of his inaugural sermon a text from the Bible, Acts XVII, 18: 'What on earth does this babbler mean?' A parallel with the present self-portrait was suggested by Schiff: 'The best place to begin is with Fuseli's small self-portrait dating from his short time in Holy Orders (1761-2). He shows himself thinking of a sermon with remarkable irony: wearing a dressing-gown, a night-cap and with a large pipe, here he is as a young clergyman enjoying the comforts of his stipend: but his bearing and expression are the ones of a stubborn reverie which reveals that his occupation is a jest. It exposes the holy profession as a charade which he is acting out as a practical joke, while his thoughts and convictions are meanwhile elsewhere. We are reminded of that self-mockery of the text for his inaugural sermon', G. Schiff, op. cit., p. 58.