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拍品專文
This sensitive pencil drawing is a variant of the drawing in pen and ink over pencil identified by Schiff as Vampire diving down onto the body of a prostrate man and dated 1815-20 (Schiff, I, no. 1513a, illustrated II, p. 500; this is on the same sheet as a pencil drawing of Jacob wrestling with the Angel, with a list of members of the Council of the Royal Academy between 1792 and 1815 on the back; the sheet is watermarked ‘J Whatman 1809’).
Here the figures are clothed, Hero's aerial figure is in a billowing, diaphanous gown; set against a background of waves with a building on the right, presumably the tower in the story. The scene is altogether more positive than Schiff’s identification of the diving female figure as a vampire would suggest. Indeed, Fuseli inscribes the drawing in Greek ‘Hero’, identifying the subject as the mythological story of the lovers Hero and Leander. Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite at Abydos on the Asian shore of the Hellespont whereas Leander, her lover, lived at Sestus on the opposite side of the strait. One night, as he swam across to visit her, a storm blew out the light she had set to guide him and he drowned; Hero then leapt from her tower, ending her life and reuniting herself with her lover in the other world. The story would have been well-known to Fuseli from classical literature and also Christopher Marlowe's poem of that title, completed by George Chapman and published posthumously in 1598.
David Weinglass identifies three further variations of the subject as well as that already mentioned. The first is a more finished version of the 'Vampire' drawing (Kunsthaus, Winterthur; not in Schiff; circa 1818-20). The second is cited by Schiff as ‘Hovering woman with fluttering draperies’, c. 1810 (from the collection of the Countess of Guilford, Schiff, no. 1710; Kunsthaus, Zurich) and the third is entitled 'Flying female genius over a figure of a recumbent man' (Schiff, no. 1711; Öffentlichen Kunstsammlung, Basel, on paper watermarked '1812', dated circa 1812-20).
Here the figures are clothed, Hero's aerial figure is in a billowing, diaphanous gown; set against a background of waves with a building on the right, presumably the tower in the story. The scene is altogether more positive than Schiff’s identification of the diving female figure as a vampire would suggest. Indeed, Fuseli inscribes the drawing in Greek ‘Hero’, identifying the subject as the mythological story of the lovers Hero and Leander. Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite at Abydos on the Asian shore of the Hellespont whereas Leander, her lover, lived at Sestus on the opposite side of the strait. One night, as he swam across to visit her, a storm blew out the light she had set to guide him and he drowned; Hero then leapt from her tower, ending her life and reuniting herself with her lover in the other world. The story would have been well-known to Fuseli from classical literature and also Christopher Marlowe's poem of that title, completed by George Chapman and published posthumously in 1598.
David Weinglass identifies three further variations of the subject as well as that already mentioned. The first is a more finished version of the 'Vampire' drawing (Kunsthaus, Winterthur; not in Schiff; circa 1818-20). The second is cited by Schiff as ‘Hovering woman with fluttering draperies’, c. 1810 (from the collection of the Countess of Guilford, Schiff, no. 1710; Kunsthaus, Zurich) and the third is entitled 'Flying female genius over a figure of a recumbent man' (Schiff, no. 1711; Öffentlichen Kunstsammlung, Basel, on paper watermarked '1812', dated circa 1812-20).