Biography of john henry fuseli quotes

Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“It is not for me, (who have courted and still continue to court Colour as a despairing lover courts a disdainful mistress,) to presume, by adding my opinion, to degrade the great one delivered; but the attachments of fancy ought not to regulate the motives of a teacher, or direct his plan of art: it becomes me therefore to tell you, that if the principle which animates the art gives rights and privilege to Colour not its own; if from a medium, it raises it to a representative of all; if what is claimed in vain by form and mind, it fondly [334] grants to colour”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“His figure is a class, it characterizes every beauty of virility verging on age; the prince, the priest, the father are visible, but, absorbed in the man, serve only to dignify the victim of one great expression; though poised by the artist, for us to apply the compass to the face of the Laocoon, is to measure the wave fluctuating in the storm: this tempestuous front, this contracted nose, the immersion of these eyes, and above all, that long-drawn mouth, are separate and united, seats of convulsion, features of nature struggling within the jaws of death.”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“He who, with the same freedom of access to Nature as another man, contents himself to approach her only through his medium, has resigned his birth-right and originality together; his master's manner will be his style.

He studied, and, as far as his penetration reached, established certain proportions of the human frame, but he did not invent a style: every work of his is a proof that he wanted the power of imitation, of concluding from what he saw, to what he did not see, that he copied rather than selected the forms that surrounded him, and sans remorse tacked deformity and meagerness to fulness, and sometimes to beauty.”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“Nature herself has set her barriers between age and age, between genius and genius, which no mortal overleaps; all attempts to raise to perfection at once, what can only be reared by a succession of epochs, must prove abhortive and nugatory: the very proposals of premiums, honours, and rewards to excite talent or rouse genius, prove of themselves that the age is unfavourable to Art; for, had it the patronage of the public, how could it want them?”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“I fear we have but very scanty means of exciting those powers over the imagination, which make so very considerable and refined a part of poetry.

It animates the features, attitudes, and gestures, which Invention selected, and Composition arranged; its principles, like theirs, are simplicity, propriety, and energy.”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“Falconet does not at all acquiesce in the praise that is bestowed on Timanthes; not only because it is not his invention, but because he thinks meanly of this trick of concealing, except in instances of blood, where the objects would be too horrible to be seen; but, says he, 'in an afflicted Father, in a King, in Agamemnon, you, who are a painter, conceal from me the most interesting circumstance, and then put me off with sophistry and a veil.

Applied to execution, it means that dexterous power which hides the means by which it was attained, the difficulties it has conquered.”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“The general medium of paint is Oil; and in that, according to the division of our illustrious commentator on Du Fresnoy, "all the modes of harmony, or of producing that effect of colours which is required in a picture, may be reduced to three, two of which belong to the Grand style, and the other to the Ornamental.

Fuseli’s literary pursuits complemented his visual art, providing insights into the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of his creative endeavors.

Fuseli’s work extended beyond painting to include book illustrations and designs for the theater. Fuseli was a much respected and influential figure in his lifetime, but his work was generally neglected for about a century after his death until the Expressionists and Surrealists saw in him a kindred spirit.

They included dramatic foreshortening of figures, strong chiaroscuro, extravagant gestures and distortions of scale, and a preference for new, often obscure, literary subjects which stressed the demonic side of human nature. Alternatively the painting may have been conceived as an act of romantic revenge.

An unforgettable image of a woman in the throes of a violently erotic dream, this painting shows how far ahead of his time Fuseli was in exploring the murky areas of the psyche where sex and fear meet.

His fascination with the horrifying and fantastic also comes out in many of his literary subjects, which formed a major part of his output; he painted several works for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, and in 1799 he followed this example by opening a Milton Gallery in Pall Mall with an exhibition of forty-seven of his own paintings.

The first may be called the Roman manner, where the colours are of a full and strong body, such as are found in the Transfiguration.”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“Before we proceed to the process and the methods of invention, it is not superfluous to advert to a question which has often been made, and by some has been answered in the negative; whether it be within the artist's province or not, to find or to combine a subject from himself, without having recourse to tradition or the stores of history and poetry?”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“Whatever be the ideal form of Christ, the Saviour of mankind, extending his arm to relieve the afflicted, the hopeless, the dying, is a subject that comes home to the breast of every one who calls himself after his name:—the artist is in the sphere of adoration with the Christian.
A great and beneficent character, eminently exerting unknown healing powers over the family of disease and pain, claims the participation of every feeling man, though he be no believer:—the artist is in the sphere of sentiment with the Deist or Mahometan.”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“But design, composition, and colour, were no more than the submissive vehicles, or enchanted ministers of its charms to Correggio.

The predominance of tender flesh, and white or tinted drapery on the foreground, whilst the more distant groups are embrowned by masculine tints and draperies of deeper hue, prove, that if Raffaello could command individual colour, he had not penetrated its general principle.”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“Had I brought my eyes and mind with me, I might perhaps offer some tolerable observations on the charms that surround me, to one who is all eye and all mind; but she who is really possessed by one great object, is blind to all others; and though Milton could never have been the poet of 'Paradise Lost,' had he been born blind, blindness was of service to him when he composed it.”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“The beauty we acknowledge is that harmonious whole of the human frame, that unison of parts to one end, which enchants us; the result of the standard set by the great masters of our art, the ancients, and confirmed by the submissive verdict of modern imitation.

Without truth of line no true expression is possible; and the passions, whose inward energy stamped form on feature, equally reside, fluctuate, flash or lower on it in colour, and give it energy by light and shade.
To make a face speak clearly and with propriety, it must not only be well constructed, but have its own exclusive character.

Reynolds encouraged him to take up painting, and he spent the years 1770-78 in Italy, engrossed in the study of Michelangelo, whose elevated style he sought to emulate for the rest of his life. On the back of the canvas, there is an unfinished portrait of a girl who may have been the object of the artist's unrequited attention.

In 1786 Fuseli was commissioned to paint nine illustrations for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery (opened 1789).

His important contributions to the literature and theory of art included his series of lectures to the students of the Royal Academy and his additions to Pilkington's Lives of the Artists (1805), as well as his book Lectures on Painting (1801) and his translation of Winckelmann's Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1765).

Painting Style

The characteristics of Fuseli's mature style were well defined before his departure from Italy.

The Nightmare owes its enduring popularity to 2 main factors: it was one of the first paintings to successfully portray an intangible idea, rather than an event, a person, or a story. If Phidias and Polycletus have discovered the substance and established the permanent principle [60] of the human frame, they have not exhausted the variety of human appearances and human character; if they have abstracted the forms of majesty and those of beauty, Nature, compared with their works, will point out a grace that has been left for thee”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“If in the School of Athens he has excelled it in individual tints, in tints that rival less than challenge the glow and juice of Titian, they are scattered more in fragments than in masses, and at the expense or with neglect of general unison, if we except the central and connecting figure of Epictetus.

If it be out of our power to furnish the student's activity with adequate practice, we may contribute to form his theory; and Criticism founded on experiment, instructed by comparison, in possession of the labours of every epoch of Art, may spread the genuine elements of taste, and check the present torrent of affectation and insipidity.”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“An adopted idea or figure in a work of genius is a foil or a companion of the rest; but an idea of genius borrowed by mediocrity, tears all associate shreds, it is the giant's thumb by which the pigmy offered the measure of his own littleness.

If his labours had perished with himself, the change which they effected in the opinions and the works of his contemporaries would still have entitled him to the first honours of the art.”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“History, strictly so called, follows the drama: fiction now ceases, and invention consists only in selecting and fixing with dignity, precision, and sentiment, the moments of reality.

The chief, if not the only occasion which the painter has for this artifice, is, when the subject is improper to be more fully represented, either for the sake of decency, or to avoid what would be disagreeable to be seen”

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Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli…

“To raise the Arts to a conspicuous height may not perhaps be in our power; we shall have deserved well of posterity if we succeed in stemming their farther downfall, if we fix them on the solid base of principle.

It is this demon who is causing the nightmare rather than the horse (or "night-mare") that peers through the curtains.