Character of Fuseli as an Artist.—His early style.—His ardent pursuit of excellence in design.—His neglect of mechanical means, particularly as regards Colours.—His professional independence, unmixed with obstinacy.—His preeminent faculty of invention, and success in the portraiture of the ideal.—His deficiencies as to correctness, and disinclination to laborious finish.—Causes of his limited popularity as a Painter.—His felicity in Likenesses.—His colour and chiar' oscuro.—His qualities as a Teacher of the Fine Arts.—His ardent love of Art.—Arrangements as to the disposal of his Works, &c.—List of his Subjects exhibited at the Royal Academy, from 1774 to 1825.
It now remains to speak of Fuseli as an artist, and on this subject it is not necessary to be very diffuse, having been favoured with the able article, to be found in the Appendix, from the pen of William Young Ottley, Esq., a gentleman who was for many years the intimate friend of Fuseli, whose talents as an amateur artist, whose knowledge, taste, and judgment in the Fine Arts are so eminently conspicuous, and whose claims to distinction are so well known to the public by his various works.
It has been shewn throughout this memoir, that the Fine Arts was the ruling passion of Fuseli, but that his father took more than ordinary pains to prevent his becoming an artist, and even checked his wishes to practise in the Fine Arts as an amusement; hence, the benefits which are considered to arise from that early education which artists usually receive, were altogether withheld from him. His style of drawing in early life was formed from those prints, which he could only consult by stealth, in his father's collection, and these were chiefly from the German school. From this circumstance, his early works have figures short in stature, with muscular, but clumsy limbs. But in the invention of the subject, even in his youth, he took the most striking moment, and impressed it with novelty and grandeur; hence some of his early productions tell the stories which they are intended to represent, with a wonderful felicity, and, in this respect, are little inferior to his later works; a circumstance which he himself was not backward to acknowledge. Fuseli always aimed to arrive at the highest point of excellence, particularly in design, and constantly avowed it. When young, he wrote in the Album of a friend, "I do not wish to build a cottage, but to erect a pyramid;" and to this precept he adhered during life, scorning to be less than the greatest. Until he was twenty-five years of age, he had never used oil colours; and he was so inattentive to these materials, that during life he took no pains in their choice or manipulation. To set a palette, as artists usually do, was with him out of the question; he used many of his colours in a dry, powdered state, and rubbed them up with his pencil only, sometimes in oil alone, which he used largely, at others, with an addition of a little spirit of turpentine, and not unfrequently in gold size; regardless of the quantity of either, or their general smoothness when laid on, and depending, as it would appear to a spectator, more on accident for the effect which they were intended to produce, than on any nice distinction of tints in the admixture or application of the materials. It appears doubtful whether this deficiency in his early education, and his neglect also of mechanical means, will be detrimental to his fame as an artist, particularly in the minds of those who can penetrate beyond the surface; for if he had been subjected to the trammels of a school, his genius would have been fettered; and it is then probable that we should have lost those daring inventions, that boldness and grandeur of drawing, (incorrect, certainly, sometimes in anatomical precision,) so fitting to his subjects, and that mystic chiar' oscuro, which create our wonder and raise him to the first rank as an artist. He was always proud of having it believed that, in the Fine Arts in particular, in some of the languages, and in many branches of literature, he had arrived at celebrity and eminence, more by his own unassisted endeavours than from the instructions of others. And, in reference to this, he on one occasion exclaimed, in the words of Glendower, with a considerable degree of self-complacency—
"Where is he living, clipped in with the sea
That chides the banks of England, Scotland, Wales,
Which calls me pupil!"[68]
After quitting his paternal roof, the first work of art which, as I have before stated, appeared to impress his mind with the grandeur of its proportions, was Rëichel's colossal figure of St. Michael, over the gateway of the Arsenal at Augsburg; and he afterwards, from having seen this, altered in some degree the proportions of his figures. But still, most of the faults of the German school, in this particular, remained, until after he had visited Italy. The works of the ancients in sculpture, the frescoes of Michael Angelo and Raphael, and the oil paintings of the great masters of the Italian school which he studied there, particularly the two first, produced a still greater change in the proportions of his figures, and he founded his future works upon them: if, however, any figure or group of figures may be quoted to have had a greater influence in this, or to have impressed his mind with more than ordinary notions of grandeur, the two colossal marble statues[69] by Phidias and Praxiteles upon Monte Cavallo, may be instanced; these chiefly regulated his proportions and influenced his style, although it must be acknowledged that, in the length of limbs, he frequently exceeded them. I have heard him dilate upon the sensations which were produced upon his mind when he has sometimes contemplated these grand works of art, on an evening, when the sky was murky for some distance above the horizon, and they were illuminated by occasional flashes of vivid lightning.
Fuseli paid much attention, and gave due consideration to the suggestions of others, respecting his own performances, particularly with regard to the proportions of his figures, and indeed courted the observations not only of the learned, but of those also who are unskilled in the art, and usually profited by their remarks. When Mr. Ottley, then a very young man, and always an admirer of the Fine Arts, was introduced to him by Mr. Seward, in the year 1789, he was painting the picture of "Wolfram introducing Bertram of Navarre to the place where he had confined his wife with the skeleton of her Lover,"[70] which was exhibited the following year, this gentleman observed, "I like your composition much, but I think the proportions of the figures in the back-ground, those, I mean, of the Baron and his friend, too long in the lower limbs." Fuseli paused for a time, and then answered, "You are right," and immediately reduced them in height.
In invention, which is not within the rules of art, and therefore may be considered the highest quality of a poet or a painter; no man has gone beyond him, and perhaps he possessed this quality in a higher degree than any other artist, since the restoration of the Fine Arts in Europe. The portfolios of drawings which he left, fully establish his claim, in this respect, to his being considered a genius of the first class, and as such place him in the highest rank of artists, Michael Angelo and Raphael not excepted. These drawings were made with wonderful felicity and facility; and a spectator would be astonished to see with what ease and power he invented and executed them. In telling the story of the subject, he was never deficient; and the designs made by him would be enough to occupy the lives of many painters to put them upon canvass; for there was no very striking incident in the poets in particular, or in the historians, from Hesiod down to our own times, which, at some period of his long life, had not been the subject of his pencil. On his drawings, he usually put the time when, and place where made; but I know of no instance of his having placed either his name or a monogram upon a picture.
No artist had a more vivid fancy than Fuseli, or was more happy in pourtraying superhuman and ideal beings: thus, the visions of Dante and Spenser, and the poetic flights of Shakspeare and Milton, were stamped even with originality by his pencil; and those scenes which, from their difficulty to be represented on paper or on canvass, would deter most artists from attempting them, were his favourite subjects; and in his delineation of them, he may generally be placed on a par with, and he occasionally soars above, the poet. Perhaps to no man can the following lines be more aptly applied than to Fuseli:—
"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the painter's brush
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation, and a name."