Henry Fuseli was a Swiss-born painter who made his career in London, where he taught painting at the Royal Academy.
He was born in Zurich on February 6, 1741, and died near London on April 16, 1825. His name lives on through The Nightmare of 1781, a sleeping woman with a demon on her chest and a horse staring through a curtain.
Nothing in his youth pointed to such a picture. He came to painting late, in his late twenties, after starting out in the church.
The canvas also hides a second picture. On its back is an unfinished portrait of a girl, and she may be the young woman Fuseli loved in Zurich and was never allowed to marry.
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Fuseli started life as Johann Heinrich Füssli, the son of a Zurich portrait painter and writer. His family steered him toward the church, and he was ordained a Protestant minister in 1761, at twenty.
His closest friend since boyhood, Johann Kaspar Lavater, was also headed for the church. In 1762, a year after Fuseli's ordination, the two friends wrote a text together, and it got them into serious trouble.
A pamphlet and a flight from Zurich
The text was a pamphlet called The Unjust Bailiff. In it, Fuseli and Lavater accused Felix Grebel, the former bailiff of Grüningen, of abusing his office. Grüningen was a country district ruled by Zurich, and its bailiff was the official the city sent to govern it.
Two young clergymen were attacking one of Zurich's own officials in print. The way the city answered them would end Fuseli's life in Zurich and start the long road that took him to London.
What You'll Discover
What a pamphlet cost a young minister.
Who told a translator to paint.
Who the sleeper might be.
What hung on Freud's wall.
What Wollstonecraft asked of him.
What his biggest gamble cost him.