Henry Fuseli, R.A.

With P. and D. Colnaghi, London;
by whom sold to Randall Davies;
Ray Livingstone Murphy;
sale, London, Christie’s, 19 November 1985, lot 32a

The medium of this large sheet has remained in good condition. The sheet has darkened in some areas and there are several creases visible. The work has not been laid down.
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In this drawing Fuseli has employed his very great artistic talent to present an image of powerful psychological intensity. On both the recto and verso, he has experimented with a composition that shows a woman, dressed in flowing robes, with her head bent in deep melancholic thought. The gravity of her mood seems to be represented by the heavy chains that she wears and the demonic figure, which hovers menacingly above her head. For an artist celebrated for his crucial role in the transition from 18^th Century classicism to 19^thCentury romanticism, this is an archetypal image.

Gert Schiff has suggested that Fuseli may have made this drawing in circa 1803, in connection with The Columbiad, an epic poem by Joel Barlow about the young American Federation, for which he produced four illustrations. Schiff noted that the present lot might be an initial idea for one of these, The Inquisition, which shows a female figure stepping on the chest of a half-naked woman bound by shackles to the ground.¹ Aside from this theory, it is interesting to note that the swooping figure in the upper part of the composition had occupied Fuseli’s mind earlier in his career. A variation of it appears in his Roman Sketchbook, while the figure of Dante in his Dante and Virgil in the Icy Hell of Cocytus takes on a similar form. Both these works date from the mid 1770s and are now in the British Museum.

1. G. Schiff, Johann Heinrich Fusseli 1741-1825, Munich 1973, p. 580, no. 1342a