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Lot Essay
The significant rediscovery of Fuseli's missing first painting, Joseph interpreting the Dreams of the Pharaoh's Baker and Butler, has thrown some much needed light on the curious disconnect between this work and the two known engravings purportedly after it (see above). Its scheduled re-exposure to modern viewers after so many years of being kept out of sight will at least help dent if not wholly dispel the still frequent misconception in the popular mind that a majority of Fuseli's paintings tend to be dark and lacking in colour-appeal. It is also time to recognise that Fuseli's first painting was rapidly followed by a substantial number of other documented but hitherto unlocated pictures that fill the assumed void of such productions between 1768 and 1779.
Henry Fuseli, born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zurich, was descended from a long line of bell-founders, artisans and painters. His father, Johann Caspar, a former itinerant portrait painter, writer on art and collector of early Swiss art, encouraged the artistic aspirations of Henry's four siblings but was opposed to him becoming an artist; Henry was instead sent to the Caroline College in Zurich to be educated as a clergyman. In 1761 he was ordained a Zwinglian minister, but he had eagerly absorbed the revolutionary critical theories of J.J. Bodmer and J.J. Breitinger on the nature of poetry, that led to the rise of the Sturm und Drang ('Storm and Stress') movement and eventually full-blown German romanticism. By now he had become a polyglot steeped in the classics, with an almost verbatim knowledge of Homer, the Nibelungenlied, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, all of which (including the Bible) as an history painter he plumbed for the subject matter. But his desire to become an artist had been ineradicable and his long career in art was already underway by the age of eight when he began secretly copying prints and drawings in his father's extensive collection, using his left hand to avoid detection. This combination of erudition and dedication to art would make Fuseli one of the most learned painters and insightful art critics of the 18th century. Interestingly, it was under the influence of Bodmer's political lectures that he and hisfriends, Felix Hess and Johann Caspar Lavater, wrote their exposé of a corrupt Zurich magistrate which led the Zurich authorities to suggest the three authors leave the country and go into temporary exile in Germany. Here Fuseli was initiated into that remarkable pan-European meritocracy of thinkers and writers working to free the creative consciousness from its constricting rationalistic fetters; armed with introductions to influential people Fuseli set out for London in 1764 as a spokesman for German literature and aesthetics. Many of these individuals who, like the banker Thomas Coutts and Joseph Johnson, the 'radical' bookseller, befriended Fuseli, also became generous long-term patrons of his art, whether in the form of history paintings or illustrations for books by Darwin, Cowper and others.
During the next four years Fuseli supported himself by his pen, supplementing his journalistic work by providing the booksellers with designs for book illustrations. But by early 1768 he had begun to seriously contemplate devoting himself wholly to his art and sought a meeting with Joshua (later Sir Joshua) Reynolds. The selection of drawings and etchings that Fuseli showed him so impressed Reynolds that he urged Fuseli to become a painter and study in Italy, inspiring him to create his first oil painting, Joseph interpreting the Dreams of the Pharaoh's Baker and Butler. This splendid painting with its dynamic translation of a complex psychological narrative into memorable visual terms demonstrates Fuseli's striking painterly intelligence on this his first foray into this new medium, fully supporting Reynolds's judgment that Fuseli could be a successful 'colourist as well as a draughtsman'(Knowles, op. cit., I pp. 43-4) - notwithstanding his lack of formal training as a painter and his rather wistful statement in his Eighth Lecture that he had 'courted...Colour as a despairing lover courts a disdainful mistress' (Knowles, II, op. cit., p. 333; G. Bungarten, J. H. Fussli's 'Lectures on Painting', 2005, I, p. 217). Fuseli utilizes in this picture almost all of the colours which will comprise his mature palette. At the beginning of 1770 only a few months before he is due to leave for Rome, he is scrambling to complete three new paintings for Thomas Coutts to make up for the destruction of recent paintings in a fire at Joseph Johnson's house, in which he also lost many drawings and literary papers. He will depart for Italy in late May 1770 carrying promises of commissions and monetary contributions from many friends like Coutts. On arrival in Rome he will adopt the Italianate form and pronunciation of his name. Nine years later, after a six-month layover in Zurich en route, he will return to London as an international celebrity, to whose growing fame Lavater had in large measure contributed by keeping Herder, Goethe and other leading figures of the German Enlightenment abreast of his career and circulating his drawings among them, many by now advantageously enshrined in his Essays on Physiognomy. By the turn of the century Fuseli had become a prominent member of the English art establishment as Professor of Painting to the Royal Academy, a post he occupied simultaneously with that of Keeper for the last two decades of his life.
Although the theme of Joseph and the Baker and Butler was less common in 18th-century art than other episodes of Joseph's life, Fuseli's choice of subject was an apt one for an ordained Zwinglian minister with his close knowledge of the Bible. He was also deeply immersed at this date in creating his eleven illustrations (three of which he also engraved himself) for Willoughby's 2-volume Practical Family Bible, that appeared after his departure for Rome (D. Weinglass, Prints and Illustrations, by and after Fuseli, 1994, nos. 25-35). Not surprisingly, this highly expressive and theatrical painting exhibits stylistic qualities similar to these rather recherché and eccentric biblical illustrations (in particular Jonah's Indignation). What may have further aroused Fuseli's interest in the Butler and the Baker was his growing preoccupation in the 1760s with themes of dreams and visions, witness drawings such as his relatively unsophisticated Fuseli visited in a Dream by his Friends (1763) and the more imaginatively conceived Dream of Prince Arthur (1769) and in later decades such erotically-charged representations of dream-beset women as The Nightmare (1781) and his etching An Allegory of Love (c. 1790).
The lower portion of Fuseli's painting, showing the interior of one of the wards of Pharaoh's prison and its three occupants, carries the full dramatic weight of the depiction. The room is in semi-darkness but there is sufficient illumination to highlight the faces and garb of his three protagonists. As is his usual practice he dispenses with all but the absolute minimum of architectural detail so he can focus better on his human subjects. He also exhibits his characteristic fidelity to his source, although the story related in Genesis, Chapter 40, leaves considerable leeway for him to improvise.
The upper part of the picture seen through the large window displays useful iconographic clues, such as the ancient Egyptian sistrum propped against the wall at the left-hand edge of the canvas and what appear to be the headless torso and front leg of a badly damaged sphinx, all emblematic of the geographic location of the events depicted in the painted narrative. But other familiar personifications of ancient Egypt such as pyramids and obelisks do not appear to be pictured here. Although stripped of his post as head of Potiphar's household and now himself a prisoner - if also a 'trusty' - Joseph's attitude and the elegant red toga-like robe he is wearing endow him with a palpable air of authority as he stands on a low platform that elevates him over the shackled Butler and Baker while he interprets their dreams and enumerates on his fingers the details. His dominant role is also reinforced by his positioning within the composition.
Fuseli's treatment of the Butler and Baker is clearly enhanced by his early awareness of physiognomic principles, particularly those of its more practical branch, pathognomy (Knowles, op. cit. III, p. 125). The extent to which the application of these tenets had strengthened the expressive force of his artistic productions, including his first painting, is suggested by his two remarkable series of imaginary portraits of 'Swiss artists' and 'Humanists and reformers' executed between 1754-1756, and totaling some sixty drawings.
The Butler sits unmoving at the centre of Fuseli's grouping in a state of almost total absorption that isolates him from all around him. He is wearing a sober dark robe, which we may assume to be his professional garb, with his apparently blank gaze directed outward. But the fact that his face and neatly-barbered head are seen in three-quarter profile, considered by Friedländer as particularly effective in evoking 'the illusion of movement, action and life', - and here enhancing the ambiguity of the situation - leaves us uncertain whether he is about to receive the wished-for verdict or already knows what his fate will be: perhaps he is still so caught up in calculating the odds in his favour that he hasn't had time to react. Some viewers may read the Butler's expression as the impassivity of an intelligent but somewhat stolid man, though if they are inclined to see his gaze as directed appraisingly towards Joseph this may counter this impression and even suggest that Fuseli's aim is to maintain suspense.
In contrast to the handling of the Butler's muted but ambivalent reception of the news of his reinstatement in his old position as Pharaoh's chief cupbearer, Fuseli's broad and dramatic portrayal of the doomed Baker's reaction to the prediction of his impending execution is the purest theatre. A grotesque and pitiful caricature, almost lost in billowing folds and the Van Dykean swirl of his dark blue robes (a frequent motif in Fuseli's oeuvre), the Baker's flushed and contorted features, gaping mouth and starting eyes, with one hand clutching his mop of hair and the other arm thrown out desperately behind him, are fused into a powerful and atavistic correlative of his inner turmoil, madness, despair and denial. The ravens pecking at his heels, emblematic of how the birds will eat his flesh after his execution, are not visible here though depicted in the the two known engraved versions of 1806 and 1826. From the figure of the madman Fuseli derived two even more impressive designs, The Escapee, as redrawn for the English edition of Lavater's Physiognomy, and the large-scale interpretation for the 'Milton Gallery' after Milton's Vision of the Lazar House in Paradise Lost, now preserved only in the form of Moses Haughton's large stipple engraving (Weinglass, op. cit., 293). The motif of the hand raised in denial and rejection reappears in Oedipus Cursing Polynices (1786).
Tracking the new compositions derived by Fuseli from previous ones gives insight into the process of their creation and Fuseli's genius in its application. As Werner Hofman explains, 'Fuseli's habit of quoting, adapting and paraphrasing a wide range of gestures and pathos formulas' had equipped him with 'a collage of quotations' (many plucked from his own works), capable of being reused and 'easily reassembled in ... slightly different ways', for new artistic effects. Paradoxically, Fuseli's cautionary Aphorism 73, 'He who conceives the given point of a subject in many different ways, conceives it not at all', often applies to his own work' (W. Hofman, 'A Captive', in Johann Heinrich Füssli 1741-1825, 1975, exhibition catalogue, pp. 34-5).
Georgina North (1798-1835), to whom Fuseli is said to have given Joseph interpreting the Dreams of the Butler and the Baker, was the granddaughter of Thomas Coutts. Fuseli's friendship with the banker extended to the whole family. Her mother (Coutts's daughter, the Countess of Guilford), Georgina and her sister Susan (future Baroness North) had great affection for Fuseli, a regular and appreciated visitor at their home at Putney Hill, and he reciprocated with charming gestures such as hiding little notes for the sisters containing 'pretty sentiments' around the grounds. He helped both sisters and their cousin, Sophia Burdett, to learn to speak and write French, German and Italian, and introduced them to Rousseau, Goethe and Dante. Under his tutelage Georgina became a talented artist, drawing brilliant illustrations of Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock, (repr. R. Halsband, Rape of the Lock and its illustrations, 1980), or executing lovely fuseliesque paraphrases after the Shepherd's Dream (Art Institute of Chicago, illus. M. Myrone's Gothic Nightmares, 2006, p. 163) or other productions by Fuseli. Many of her inventions are preserved in the North collection in the Bodleian in the form of 'private' engravings by Raddon and one of her notebooks contains a delightful likeness of Fuseli in old age asleep in an armchair. Befittingly, it was in the friendly surroundings of Putney Hill that Fuseli died on 16 April 1825.
We are very grateful to Professor David Weinglass, of the University of Missouri, Kansas City, for contributing this catalogue entry.
Henry Fuseli, born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zurich, was descended from a long line of bell-founders, artisans and painters. His father, Johann Caspar, a former itinerant portrait painter, writer on art and collector of early Swiss art, encouraged the artistic aspirations of Henry's four siblings but was opposed to him becoming an artist; Henry was instead sent to the Caroline College in Zurich to be educated as a clergyman. In 1761 he was ordained a Zwinglian minister, but he had eagerly absorbed the revolutionary critical theories of J.J. Bodmer and J.J. Breitinger on the nature of poetry, that led to the rise of the Sturm und Drang ('Storm and Stress') movement and eventually full-blown German romanticism. By now he had become a polyglot steeped in the classics, with an almost verbatim knowledge of Homer, the Nibelungenlied, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, all of which (including the Bible) as an history painter he plumbed for the subject matter. But his desire to become an artist had been ineradicable and his long career in art was already underway by the age of eight when he began secretly copying prints and drawings in his father's extensive collection, using his left hand to avoid detection. This combination of erudition and dedication to art would make Fuseli one of the most learned painters and insightful art critics of the 18th century. Interestingly, it was under the influence of Bodmer's political lectures that he and hisfriends, Felix Hess and Johann Caspar Lavater, wrote their exposé of a corrupt Zurich magistrate which led the Zurich authorities to suggest the three authors leave the country and go into temporary exile in Germany. Here Fuseli was initiated into that remarkable pan-European meritocracy of thinkers and writers working to free the creative consciousness from its constricting rationalistic fetters; armed with introductions to influential people Fuseli set out for London in 1764 as a spokesman for German literature and aesthetics. Many of these individuals who, like the banker Thomas Coutts and Joseph Johnson, the 'radical' bookseller, befriended Fuseli, also became generous long-term patrons of his art, whether in the form of history paintings or illustrations for books by Darwin, Cowper and others.
During the next four years Fuseli supported himself by his pen, supplementing his journalistic work by providing the booksellers with designs for book illustrations. But by early 1768 he had begun to seriously contemplate devoting himself wholly to his art and sought a meeting with Joshua (later Sir Joshua) Reynolds. The selection of drawings and etchings that Fuseli showed him so impressed Reynolds that he urged Fuseli to become a painter and study in Italy, inspiring him to create his first oil painting, Joseph interpreting the Dreams of the Pharaoh's Baker and Butler. This splendid painting with its dynamic translation of a complex psychological narrative into memorable visual terms demonstrates Fuseli's striking painterly intelligence on this his first foray into this new medium, fully supporting Reynolds's judgment that Fuseli could be a successful 'colourist as well as a draughtsman'(Knowles, op. cit., I pp. 43-4) - notwithstanding his lack of formal training as a painter and his rather wistful statement in his Eighth Lecture that he had 'courted...Colour as a despairing lover courts a disdainful mistress' (Knowles, II, op. cit., p. 333; G. Bungarten, J. H. Fussli's 'Lectures on Painting', 2005, I, p. 217). Fuseli utilizes in this picture almost all of the colours which will comprise his mature palette. At the beginning of 1770 only a few months before he is due to leave for Rome, he is scrambling to complete three new paintings for Thomas Coutts to make up for the destruction of recent paintings in a fire at Joseph Johnson's house, in which he also lost many drawings and literary papers. He will depart for Italy in late May 1770 carrying promises of commissions and monetary contributions from many friends like Coutts. On arrival in Rome he will adopt the Italianate form and pronunciation of his name. Nine years later, after a six-month layover in Zurich en route, he will return to London as an international celebrity, to whose growing fame Lavater had in large measure contributed by keeping Herder, Goethe and other leading figures of the German Enlightenment abreast of his career and circulating his drawings among them, many by now advantageously enshrined in his Essays on Physiognomy. By the turn of the century Fuseli had become a prominent member of the English art establishment as Professor of Painting to the Royal Academy, a post he occupied simultaneously with that of Keeper for the last two decades of his life.
Although the theme of Joseph and the Baker and Butler was less common in 18th-century art than other episodes of Joseph's life, Fuseli's choice of subject was an apt one for an ordained Zwinglian minister with his close knowledge of the Bible. He was also deeply immersed at this date in creating his eleven illustrations (three of which he also engraved himself) for Willoughby's 2-volume Practical Family Bible, that appeared after his departure for Rome (D. Weinglass, Prints and Illustrations, by and after Fuseli, 1994, nos. 25-35). Not surprisingly, this highly expressive and theatrical painting exhibits stylistic qualities similar to these rather recherché and eccentric biblical illustrations (in particular Jonah's Indignation). What may have further aroused Fuseli's interest in the Butler and the Baker was his growing preoccupation in the 1760s with themes of dreams and visions, witness drawings such as his relatively unsophisticated Fuseli visited in a Dream by his Friends (1763) and the more imaginatively conceived Dream of Prince Arthur (1769) and in later decades such erotically-charged representations of dream-beset women as The Nightmare (1781) and his etching An Allegory of Love (c. 1790).
The lower portion of Fuseli's painting, showing the interior of one of the wards of Pharaoh's prison and its three occupants, carries the full dramatic weight of the depiction. The room is in semi-darkness but there is sufficient illumination to highlight the faces and garb of his three protagonists. As is his usual practice he dispenses with all but the absolute minimum of architectural detail so he can focus better on his human subjects. He also exhibits his characteristic fidelity to his source, although the story related in Genesis, Chapter 40, leaves considerable leeway for him to improvise.
The upper part of the picture seen through the large window displays useful iconographic clues, such as the ancient Egyptian sistrum propped against the wall at the left-hand edge of the canvas and what appear to be the headless torso and front leg of a badly damaged sphinx, all emblematic of the geographic location of the events depicted in the painted narrative. But other familiar personifications of ancient Egypt such as pyramids and obelisks do not appear to be pictured here. Although stripped of his post as head of Potiphar's household and now himself a prisoner - if also a 'trusty' - Joseph's attitude and the elegant red toga-like robe he is wearing endow him with a palpable air of authority as he stands on a low platform that elevates him over the shackled Butler and Baker while he interprets their dreams and enumerates on his fingers the details. His dominant role is also reinforced by his positioning within the composition.
Fuseli's treatment of the Butler and Baker is clearly enhanced by his early awareness of physiognomic principles, particularly those of its more practical branch, pathognomy (Knowles, op. cit. III, p. 125). The extent to which the application of these tenets had strengthened the expressive force of his artistic productions, including his first painting, is suggested by his two remarkable series of imaginary portraits of 'Swiss artists' and 'Humanists and reformers' executed between 1754-1756, and totaling some sixty drawings.
The Butler sits unmoving at the centre of Fuseli's grouping in a state of almost total absorption that isolates him from all around him. He is wearing a sober dark robe, which we may assume to be his professional garb, with his apparently blank gaze directed outward. But the fact that his face and neatly-barbered head are seen in three-quarter profile, considered by Friedländer as particularly effective in evoking 'the illusion of movement, action and life', - and here enhancing the ambiguity of the situation - leaves us uncertain whether he is about to receive the wished-for verdict or already knows what his fate will be: perhaps he is still so caught up in calculating the odds in his favour that he hasn't had time to react. Some viewers may read the Butler's expression as the impassivity of an intelligent but somewhat stolid man, though if they are inclined to see his gaze as directed appraisingly towards Joseph this may counter this impression and even suggest that Fuseli's aim is to maintain suspense.
In contrast to the handling of the Butler's muted but ambivalent reception of the news of his reinstatement in his old position as Pharaoh's chief cupbearer, Fuseli's broad and dramatic portrayal of the doomed Baker's reaction to the prediction of his impending execution is the purest theatre. A grotesque and pitiful caricature, almost lost in billowing folds and the Van Dykean swirl of his dark blue robes (a frequent motif in Fuseli's oeuvre), the Baker's flushed and contorted features, gaping mouth and starting eyes, with one hand clutching his mop of hair and the other arm thrown out desperately behind him, are fused into a powerful and atavistic correlative of his inner turmoil, madness, despair and denial. The ravens pecking at his heels, emblematic of how the birds will eat his flesh after his execution, are not visible here though depicted in the the two known engraved versions of 1806 and 1826. From the figure of the madman Fuseli derived two even more impressive designs, The Escapee, as redrawn for the English edition of Lavater's Physiognomy, and the large-scale interpretation for the 'Milton Gallery' after Milton's Vision of the Lazar House in Paradise Lost, now preserved only in the form of Moses Haughton's large stipple engraving (Weinglass, op. cit., 293). The motif of the hand raised in denial and rejection reappears in Oedipus Cursing Polynices (1786).
Tracking the new compositions derived by Fuseli from previous ones gives insight into the process of their creation and Fuseli's genius in its application. As Werner Hofman explains, 'Fuseli's habit of quoting, adapting and paraphrasing a wide range of gestures and pathos formulas' had equipped him with 'a collage of quotations' (many plucked from his own works), capable of being reused and 'easily reassembled in ... slightly different ways', for new artistic effects. Paradoxically, Fuseli's cautionary Aphorism 73, 'He who conceives the given point of a subject in many different ways, conceives it not at all', often applies to his own work' (W. Hofman, 'A Captive', in Johann Heinrich Füssli 1741-1825, 1975, exhibition catalogue, pp. 34-5).
Georgina North (1798-1835), to whom Fuseli is said to have given Joseph interpreting the Dreams of the Butler and the Baker, was the granddaughter of Thomas Coutts. Fuseli's friendship with the banker extended to the whole family. Her mother (Coutts's daughter, the Countess of Guilford), Georgina and her sister Susan (future Baroness North) had great affection for Fuseli, a regular and appreciated visitor at their home at Putney Hill, and he reciprocated with charming gestures such as hiding little notes for the sisters containing 'pretty sentiments' around the grounds. He helped both sisters and their cousin, Sophia Burdett, to learn to speak and write French, German and Italian, and introduced them to Rousseau, Goethe and Dante. Under his tutelage Georgina became a talented artist, drawing brilliant illustrations of Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock, (repr. R. Halsband, Rape of the Lock and its illustrations, 1980), or executing lovely fuseliesque paraphrases after the Shepherd's Dream (Art Institute of Chicago, illus. M. Myrone's Gothic Nightmares, 2006, p. 163) or other productions by Fuseli. Many of her inventions are preserved in the North collection in the Bodleian in the form of 'private' engravings by Raddon and one of her notebooks contains a delightful likeness of Fuseli in old age asleep in an armchair. Befittingly, it was in the friendly surroundings of Putney Hill that Fuseli died on 16 April 1825.
We are very grateful to Professor David Weinglass, of the University of Missouri, Kansas City, for contributing this catalogue entry.