John Henry Fuseli (1741 - 1825) Switzerland Pencil on Paper Measure 8"in x 6"in W and 13 1/2"in H x 10 1/2"in W with frame Known for: Romantic painting, themes of horror and eroticism. Name variants: Johann Heinrich Fuessli, Henry Fuseli, J H Fussli, Johann Heinrich Fussli. Biography: To have influenced a great artist may not make a painter great, but it does help make him interesting; probably no one had more impact on William Blake than John Henry Fuseli. To look at Blake's nudes and then at Fuseli's, with their rhetorical gestures and armor-plate muscles, is to sense this. Reckon in Fuseli's eccentricities, which though irreligious were akin to Blake's own, and it seems clear why the younger Blake spared Fuseli the contempt he felt for nearly every other English artist of his day. Fuseli's relaxation from blood was lust. The most eminent of his lovers was Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneer of English Feminism. He married Sophia Rawlins whom he viewed as a cruel dominator. The image suited his sexual proclivities. Several hundred of his erotic drawings were burned by his wife after he died, and most of the survivors are either about masochism or hair fetishes, or both. He did produce one of the great sexual images of the 18th century with The Nightmare, a painting full of a sense of trespass on hitherto forbidden territory. Sigmund Freud kept a framed photograph of it on the bookcase in his Vienna study. Fuseli died in London in 1825; he had become of the most distinguished exiles in English art history. He was buried next to Sr Joshua Reynolds in St. Paul's Cathedral. Compiled and submitted August 2004 by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California