Henry Fuseli: 82 Paintings in Close Up

Henry Fuseli (1741 – 1825) was a Swiss painter, draughtsman, and writer on art, who worked and spent most of his life in Britain.

As a painter, Fuseli favored the supernatural. He pitched everything on an ideal scale, believing a certain amount of exaggeration necessary in the higher branches of historical painting. In this theory he was confirmed by the study of Michelangelo's works and the marble statues of the Monte Cavallo, which, when at Rome, he liked to contemplate in the evening, relieved against a murky sky or illuminated by lightning. The violent and intemperate action which he often displays, in the conventional wisdom, destroys the grand effect of many of his pieces.

Fuseli painted more than 200 pictures, but he exhibited only a small number of them.