Henry Fuseli, R.A.

Unframed. The sheet is irregular, with the left edge torn, but seemingly from where the envelope was roughly opened. The area around the image is somewhat yellowed, and there are some small, isolated fox marks, but they do not affect the drawing.
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In a letter to the present owner dated 20 January 1987, the late Gert Schiff dated this 'very interesting and beautiful Fuseli drawing' to circa 1790-93.  He wrote: 'Although it is somewhat difficult to identify a portrait of a person seen from the back, the lady is in all probability Fuseli's newly-wedded wife.  This follows from her hairstyle and many similar works.  She is brandishing a whip.  This means, as I always suspected, that she catered to her husband's, also otherwise documented, erotic tastes'.  Similarly Prof. David. H. Weinglass, in a recent written communication, placed the drawing circa 1790-92 and underlined the idea that it was 'made not long after Fuseli's marriage to Sophia Rawlins, which took place on 30 June 1788'.  He compared the sheet to two portraits of the young Mrs Fuseli also dating from this period, sold in London, Christie's, 14 April 1992 (lots 10 and 15).  Another, dated circa 1792 and also rapidly sketched in brown ink with Mrs Fuseli in a moment of repose, is in the Ulster Museum, Belfast.¹  Prof. Weinglass also made the interesting point that of the 150 known 'portraits' of Sophia, the imaginary and fantasised far outnumber the domestic. 

In his catalogue for the Tate Gallery's Fuseli exhibition of 1975, Schiff wrote that the many portraits Fuseli drew of his wife in their first ten years of marriage, such as the present drawing '...trace her gradual transition from the lovely young wife to the domineering virago, as well as the changing hair fashions of the time'.²  The Greek transcribed by Fuseli on the verso of the sheet was taken from Homer's Iliad, Bk. XI, lines 601-602, and translates as: 'And after him I marked the mighty Heracles- his phantom'.  Whether or not the phrase relates (in the words of Schiff) to the 'intimate content of the drawing' is open to debate. 

Weinglass, in a letter dated 17 September 1995, stated his intention of including the drawing in his revised English edition of Schiff's monograph.  We are most grateful to him for his help in the cataloguing of this drawing.

1. G. Schiff in Henry Fuseli 1741-1825, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1975, p. 130, cat. no. 179
2. Ibid., p. 15