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Lot Essay
Fuseli's contemporaries recognised his prediliction for the erotic back view in his drawings of women as one of his stylistic trademarks. (The Greek word 'callipyga' means 'beautiful buttocks'). Fellow artists like Rowlandson and Turner deliberately included such quotations in their own work. The present drawing previously assigned to '1810-1820' is in fact datable to the 1790s. It has been imaginatively elaborated from the artist's compositionally related but non-phallic A Woman Standing at a Dressing Table (G. Schiff, op.cit. 1973, no. 1069, 1790-1792; National Gallery, Ottowa) from the same period, showing her garbed in a simple dress. Both drawings clearly display, however, Fuseli's customary fetishistic preoccupation with fantastic and extravagant coiffures, frequently with obvious phallocentric elements. Two other strongly phallic drawings executed at about the same time as the Callipyga are also misdated to post 1810 (G. Schiff, op. cit. 1973, nos. 1616-1617). A further important common element of this group is the identity of the woman depicted, namely Fuseli's beautiful and fashion-smitten wife Sophia, over two decades younger than he. Her features, her remarkable hairdos, and her 'exquisite symmetry of form, [characterised by] all the fulness and perfection of the antique' (Balmanno, op. cit., p. 200), are the centre-piece of that remarkable gallery of over 150 fantasised 'portraits' of her (not all of them flattering) created by Fuseli during the 1790s. These often merge into his erotic oeuvre, with its frequent 'Sado-Mannerist' representations (the phrase was coined by Jeffrey Daniels) drawn from history, literature and mythology, of defenceless men held in thrall by cruel tormentresses (e.g. Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah, Gunther and Brunhild). Fuseli's Greek inscription, with its double meaning, 'I suffer pain' and 'I inflict pain' is an apt allusion to this imaginary world ruled over by femme fatales.