The Swiss Painter Whose Muse Was His Nightmare

The eighteenth-century Swiss artist Henry Fuseli was known for his grotesque and outlandish depictions of mythological and supernatural subjects. His most celebrated painting, “The Nightmare,” which was exhibited to considerable excitement at the Royal Academy’s gallery in 1782, shows an unconscious woman draped across a couch with her head drooping almost to the floor, a demonic incubus squatting on her chest, and a sightless horse baring its teeth in the background.

Fuseli was born in 1741 in Zürich but lived much of his life in England. As keeper of the schools at the Royal Academy from 1804 until his death, in 1825, Fuseli enjoyed the perk of an apartment overlooking the grand quadrangle of Somerset House, the palatial Neoclassical building on the Strand that was then the institution’s home. A sketch made by J. M. W. Turner shows a balustrade with a birdcage balanced upon it outside one of what would have been Fuseli’s windows; a contemporaneous watercolor painted by an unknown visitor captures the high, narrow room with green walls, bare floorboards, and an open fireplace in which Fuseli made his paintings. The artist and diarist Benjamin Robert Haydon once called upon Fuseli at Somerset House, and gave a vivid account of the environment, which was, he wrote, “enough to frighten anybody at twilight,” with canvases depicting “galvanized devils—malicious witches brewing their incantations—Satan bridging Chaos.” He went on: “Humour, pathos, terror, blood, and murder, met one at every look!” The artist himself, however, was rather more unprepossessing. Having “fancied Fuseli himself to be a giant,” Haydon instead saw “a little bony hand slide round the edge of the door, followed by a little white-headed lion-faced man in an old flannel dressing-gown tied round his waist with a piece of rope and upon his head the bottom of Mrs. Fuseli’s work basket.”

The keeper’s former quarters at Somerset House now form part of the Courtauld Gallery, which is hosting an exhibition of Fuseli’s drawings, “Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism.” It centers upon drawings and pen-and-ink sketches, many of them of the artist’s wife, Sophia (née Rawlins), whom he married in 1788. These rarely seen works demonstrate the artist’s well-known taste for the monstrous and extreme, while also capturing something of the eccentricity witnessed by Haydon of the odd little fellow in dressing gown and improvized headgear. The gallery’s Web site warns that some images are “of a sexual nature”: they include a selection of Fuseli’s pornographic drawings, made for private consumption, such as “Three women and a recumbent man,” the latter of whom is more or less reduced to an inert pair of legs and a very tumescent phallus. But the explicitly sexual content of the show is among its least disturbing aspects. Much more unsettling are the many images that linger with obsessional attention upon the extravagant hair styles and maquillage of Sophia Fuseli, an artists’ model before her marriage, and whose visage and form Fuseli revisited over and over.

According to an early biographer of the artist, Sophia grew up not far from the spa city of Bath, “a young lady of reputable parentage and of personal attractions.” Her husband was more than twenty years her senior, with a wealth of erotic experience; however reputable her background, Sophia’s marriage to Fuseli would have insured her exposure to risqué attachments between men and women. Early in the Fuselis’ marriage, none other than Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” proposed that she join the artist and his wife in a ménage à trois. Sophia rejected that arrangement, but what role she did fulfill for Fuseli, materially and imaginatively, is tantalizingly suggested in the images on display at the Courtauld. Many of the portraits of Sophia show her hair dressed in elaborate sculptural arrangements. In a watercolor done in 1790, it has been fashioned into crescent shapes that resemble a pair of rams’ horns that meet in a bulbous clump in the center of her brow. In another image, from 1798, Sophia regards herself in a mirror, revealing the hair behind her head descending in a shiny fold like a fall of water. A number of the drawings show Sophia with hair styles that are familiar from classical sculpture or drawing, her entire scalp covered in tight curls like a Roman matron. In one unsubtle juxtaposition, Sophia is drawn in a high-necked gown with her hair arranged in a single comb-like crest above tightly curled rows, while behind her looms a portrait of a blank-eyed Medusa with snaky locks wearing an identical collar. As David H. Solkin, one of the curators of the show, notes in a catalogue essay, “If there is a consistent logic to these images of the modern woman, it is a logic of repression, taken to lengths that implicitly dramatize the extreme nature of the threat that her sexuality poses to the male artist’s virility.”

Whether Sophia Fuseli’s hair was ever actually dressed in styles as extreme as depicted by Fuseli is up for debate; it’s possible, even likely, that his imagination sometimes took over. Certain of his drawings of women’s heads, with their extended necks and reality-defying hairdos, bring to mind the uncanny exaggerations in the work of the contemporary artist John Currin, in which perversity itself is the subject. Late-eighteenth-century fashion illustrations, however, show models wearing similarly outlandish bouffants, indicating the heights to which capillary style-setters would aspire, employing tools such as hot irons that would be used to shape curls, the hair protected from singeing by slips of paper known as papillotes. Even allowing for artistic license, the coiffures in Fuseli’s drawings could only have been achieved with enormous time and effort on the part of Sophia and whatever professional styling help she obtained. In the view of Mechthild Fend, a professor of art history at Goethe University, in Frankfurt, who has contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue, the drawings are less works of objectification than they are a kind of aesthetic collaboration. As she writes, “hair, body and fashion were Sophia’s medium while paper, pen and ink were Henry’s.”

One does not have to agree with this equivalizing of the couples’ artistry to conclude that the power exerted in the marital dynamic was not Fuseli’s alone. Many of the images of Sophia show her in a pose (feet drawn up on a sofa, hand tucked suggestively between her thighs) or with a facial expression (teeth exposed in a smile, cheeks brightly rouged) or in a garment (translucent drapery, betraying the outline of an areola or the shadow of pubic hair) that would have suggested to a contemporary viewer that the woman depicted was a courtesan, not a respectable wife of good parentage. Even those that do show Sophia engaged in domestic activities do so with a note of subversion. “Sophia Fuseli Sewing,” from 1795, shows her bent over a piece of needlework—a conventional enough image of femininity, were it not for the word “NEMESIS” spelled out along the hem of the fabric she is sewing, as if the placid homemaker were in fact the monstrous agent of the artist’s downfall. Another image from the early nineties shows Sophia seated at a table, fixing the artist, or the viewer, with a horrifying leer. Her lips are stained red; her hair is curled into a fantastical heart-shaped crown. Her arm, which looks powerful and muscular, rests on a work basket—perhaps the very one that Benjamin Robert Haydon witnessed Fuseli wearing as his own headgear, the costume of an interrupted ritual of humiliation and transgression played out in the private keeper’s quarters at Somerset House. If Fuseli’s best-known work is called “The Nightmare,” this one, like many of these hitherto private images exhibited here, might plausibly bear the very same title. ♦