Henri Fuseli anew

Fuseli and Bodmer

Goethe Girl has been occupied with a couple of literary projects the past couple of months that kept me away from devoting as much time as I would like to Goethe and to this blog. But I have been saving up for a couple of weeks now a review in the New York Review of Books (4/20/23) of a book entitled Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age in which the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli (Heinrich Füessli) prominently features. Johnson was an English bookseller and befriended Fuseli after the latter's arrival in England in 1763. Considering that Goethe never met Fuseli, there are many posts on this site in which Fuseli and his work are mentioned. There were, after all, many links connecting Goethe and Fuseli. Goethe's first "foreign" travel, after all, was to Switzerland, where he met Bodmer, who had been Fuseli's mentor. If any reader wishes to know more about these connections, please enter "Fuseli" in the "Q" box at the top left, and you will be directed to quite a few posts.

Goethe's closest connection to Fuseli was through Johann Kaspar Lavater, a friend of Fuseli from Zurich. Both Lavater and Fuseli were fellow theology students, and the two were partners in the denunciation of a Swiss magistrate for his misdemeanors. It was a very celebrated affair that caused the magistrate to be condemned and exiled from Zurich, but since such youthful actions might affect their own future in the canton, they both undertook an educational tour of German lands in 1763, accompanied by Johann Georg Sulzer, a friend of Bodmer. In Berlin, Fuseli met the English ambassador at the Prussian court, and headed off to England with him. Lavater, meanwhile, through Sulzer's influence came in contact with individuals who (according to Goethe Handbuch 4/2) represented the leading theological, philosophical, and literary tendencies, among others Klopstock and Mendelssohn, Gellert and Gleim.

Lavater, Goethe, & Basedow

Lavater returned eventually to Switzerland, and by 1772 he was a well-known author outside his homeland with his Aussichten in die Ewigkeit (speculation re eternity), which Goethe reviewed in the Frankfurter Gelehrten Anzeigen that year; skeptically, according to Goethe Handbuch. In the same year, Lavater's small volume on physiognomy was reviewed in FGA by Johann Georg Schlosser. Goethe's own small tract, Briefe des Pastors zu *** an den Pastor zu ***, prompted Lavater to write to Goethe. It was in the summer of 1774 that they met and, for a while, formed a firm friendship and even partnership in connection with the subject of physiognomy. Together with Johann Bernhard Basedow they made a journey down the Rhine and the Lahn. (Richie Robertson has written a nice story of their "unusual friendship.") The friendship, as such, went from hot to cold within a decade or so, but Goethe wrote a wonderful account of the trio and their Rhein-Lahn journey in Book 14 of his autobiography.

This post is supposed to be about Fuseli and has turned out to be about Lavater, about whom there are also plenty of posts on this blog. As I mentioned, both he and Lavater were students of theology in Zurich, but while Lavater remained dedicated to the religious calling, Fuseli was apparently more of a free thinker. By 1779, Fuseli was firmly ensconced in London, but he remained in correspondence with Lavater. As I have discovered from some online research, Fuseli produced not only the first English translation of Winckelmann's history of Greek art, but also a book by Lavater entitled "Aphorisms on Man." The last-named was illustrated by William Blake. The review mentions Fuseli's plan to create a series of thirty huge paintings on the works of John Milton, which would be reduced to book size to illustrate the edition. Fuseli's interest is this English writer must certainly be traced back to his Swiss roots, to Bodmer, whose translation of Paradise Lost  made Milton accessible to Germans. The book did not come to fruition, but Fuseli apparently opened a Milton Gallery in 1799. Fuseli liked to portray literary topics.

Lady Macbeth Walking in Her Sleep (1784)

In London Fuseli really became "English." He was a member of Joseph Johnson's own "club" (similar to that of the 1760s of Dr. Johnson, memorialized by Boswell), which included such eminences as Joseph Priestly, William Godwin, Tom Paine, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That guest list indicates the changing times, politically and socially. Moreover, Fuseli's most famous painting, The Nightmare ("unnervingly sexy," according to NYRB reviewer Miranda Seymour) dominated the room in which they convened. Joseph Johnson's table include women as well, e.g., Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft. Fuseli must have been a very attractive man. The review points out that Wollstonecraft "became close enough to Fuseli to seek even to join the artist's marriage," a "bold suggestion," which Fuseli later claimed "was fiercely rejected by this wife." In 1792 Johnson and the Fuselis and Wollestonecraft terminated their plans to travel to France to observe the revolution after the news of the royal family's failure to escape the country, and Wollstonecraft, "anxious to snap the painful chain of association with Fuseli," traveled on her own to Paris, where she met "a charming but fickle adventurer," with whom she gave birth to her first child.

As per the review in the NYRB review, the encounter of Johnson and Fuseli had the "most enduring effect on Johnson's life." Fuseli took rooms at Johnson's premises already in 1766 and, at Johnson's death in 1809, he was, with his wife, Johnson's "devoted caregiver."

One can't help wondering what Fuseli's status would be today if he had remained in Switzerland. He is something of an in-between figure, despite his role in this important circle of early 19th-century British life as well as a member of the Royal Academy of Arts and a professor there. (Sir Joshua Reynolds was a friend.) The Freies Deutsches Hochstift in Frankfurt has the largest collection of his works in Germany, while Fuseli has featured prominently in various exhibitions in recent decades, e.g., at the Getty.  Even in Germany there has been only one biography in recent decades, and only two in the 20th century in English.

Images: Lavater, Goethe & Basedow; Lady Macbeth (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

Franz Messerschmidt's Grimacing Figure Heads

Brigitte Kronauer is a major German novelist (a Büchner Prize recipient) who also writes wonderful essays on art. Many years ago I read her essay (in the collection Die Einöde und ihr Prophet) on the sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. Last summer when I was in Vienna I finally had an opportunity to view the collection of Messerschmidt's "heads" at the Belvedere Museum. (Herewith a large selection.) Messerschmidt had always seemed unique to me, but I had to revise that opinion today at the Metropolitan Museum, when I encountered this bust of Marsyas from about 1680 by the Austrian sculptor Balthasar Permoser. Clearly there is quite a tradition of "non-classical" portrayals. "Connect, only connect," as Goethe reminded us.

Messerschmidt, born in 1736 in Bavarian territory, had a successful career as sculptor at the Hapsburg court in Vienna, turning out portrait busts of nobles and local prominences, what Kronauer calls "official masks, desired images for the public world." In 1775, however, Messerschmidt turned his back on Vienna, where he had failed to gain promotion because of his erratic behavior, perhaps a result of the lead poisoning from which he would die in 1783. In the decade before his death he turned out seventy "character heads," of which forty-nine are now extant. He never had a commission for any of the heads, and he sold none during his lifetime. The titles that now attach to the works have been added by later collectors.

Kronauer reviews the facts of his life and quarrels with the consensus that he was mentally ill. (She seems to underestimate the effect of the lead poisoning.) For the most part, she is interested in the effect of these smirking, pinched, dented, grimacing, puffed-up, wrinkled faces. Grimacing, she writes, urges us to respond by imitation, but with these character heads one recognizes immediately that their expression is not directed at us, the viewers, but, simultaneously, at some external object that we are unable to see (a ghost perhaps?) as well as at something that is trapped inside the head, behind the outer skin. "Even if it were technically possible, we wouldn't be able to mimick the expression of these variously old faces, since we can't know the soul- and mind-shattering and mobilizing impetus."

Messerschmidt was a contemporary of Lavater, the friend of Goethe's youth. With Goethe's assistance, Lavater produced his Physiognomical Fragments (1774-78), which sought to show that a person's character can be deduced from his facial features. The young Goethe might have found something to admire in Messerschmidt's busts, had he ever seen them, but the "classical" Goethe could not have approved. On a literary note, he advised readers to be careful about the work of E.T.A. Hoffmann. In 1827 he approvingly quoted the judgment of an English reviewer who wrote that Hoffman's tales are "the fevered dreams of an unsettled sick brain." If one wants to read a really good tale, he advised, one in which the impossible and the low-down, the unheard-of and the ordinary, are melded, one should instead turn to "Die neue Melusine," his own tale! I leave it to readers to decide whether Goethe's retelling of the Melusine legend ranks as high as Hoffmann's tales.

Picture credits: J. Paul Getty Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art