Lot Essay
The drawing comes from the album of drawings by Fuseli sold in these Rooms on 14 April 1992, but is clearly by another hand and can be attributed to Fuseli's pupil and follower Theodore Matthias Von Holst, a prodigy who entered the Royal Academy Schools at the age of ten and became the favourite pupil of Fuseli, the Professor of Painting there.
The drawing on the recto seems to be inspired by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Undine, published in 1811, though it does not correspond exactly to the text. Undine, a water-nymph who has replaced the lost daughter of an old fisherman and his wife as their foster-daughter, marries the knight Huldbrand. However, his affections return to his first love Bertalda, who has turned out to be the fisherman's real daughter, and Undine disappears into the waters of the Danube. On the day of Huldbrand's marriage to Bertalda, Bertalda orders the removal of a stone slab that Undine had had placed over a fountain in Huldbrand's castle. This proves remarkably easy to lift and 'at the same moment there rose from the opening of the fountain a white pillar of water high into the air'. This takes 'the shape of a pale woman veiled in white ... and Bertalda fancied that beneath the veil she could perceive the pale lineaments of Undine' (chap. 18, translated by E. Gosse). The old man at Bertalda's side is presumably an evocation of Undine's threatening uncle Kühleborn, though in the actual text he is not present at this happening. A drawing by Fuseli of 1819-22, much closer to the text, is in the Zurich Kunsthaus (Schiff 1565).
At least two of the drawings of a young girl on the verso are related to the figure of Bertalda on the recto in the placing and turn of her head. The inscription presumably refers to the Leipzig artist Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1781-1829), most famous for his portrait of Goetbe in the Campagne, and perhaps more specifically to his outlines after Sir William Hamilton's famous collection of Greek vases
The drawing on the recto seems to be inspired by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Undine, published in 1811, though it does not correspond exactly to the text. Undine, a water-nymph who has replaced the lost daughter of an old fisherman and his wife as their foster-daughter, marries the knight Huldbrand. However, his affections return to his first love Bertalda, who has turned out to be the fisherman's real daughter, and Undine disappears into the waters of the Danube. On the day of Huldbrand's marriage to Bertalda, Bertalda orders the removal of a stone slab that Undine had had placed over a fountain in Huldbrand's castle. This proves remarkably easy to lift and 'at the same moment there rose from the opening of the fountain a white pillar of water high into the air'. This takes 'the shape of a pale woman veiled in white ... and Bertalda fancied that beneath the veil she could perceive the pale lineaments of Undine' (chap. 18, translated by E. Gosse). The old man at Bertalda's side is presumably an evocation of Undine's threatening uncle Kühleborn, though in the actual text he is not present at this happening. A drawing by Fuseli of 1819-22, much closer to the text, is in the Zurich Kunsthaus (Schiff 1565).
At least two of the drawings of a young girl on the verso are related to the figure of Bertalda on the recto in the placing and turn of her head. The inscription presumably refers to the Leipzig artist Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1781-1829), most famous for his portrait of Goetbe in the Campagne, and perhaps more specifically to his outlines after Sir William Hamilton's famous collection of Greek vases