Henry Fuseli, R.A.

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 14 March 1990, lot 106, where acquired by the present owners.

Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, Sergel-Füssli, 5 October 1990 - 6 January 1991, no. 55.  

The painting depicts the scene in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II, scene 2. Puck mistakenly casts a charm on the sleeping Lysander who, on waking, immediately falls in love with Helena (who has been rebuffed by Demetrius) and renounces Hermia. ‘Content with Hermia!; No I do repent/The tedious minutes I with her have spent./Not Hermia but Helena I love./Who will not change/A raven for a dove.’ Helena, not surprisingly, is horrified by Lysander’s sudden expressions of love and indeed believes that he is mocking her. In this way the human entanglement of the play, created by Puck’s error, is set in motion. Fuseli chose the dramatic moment when Lysander, turning away from sleeping Hermia, first feels the overbearing pangs of his new love for Helena. The concentration on the heads of the three characters adds considerable emotional impact to the picture and is reminiscent of similar compositions also dating from the early 1780s, most notably The Death of Oedipus, (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and Hotspur, Glendower, Mortimer and Worcester (Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham).

In 1765 Fuseli arrived in England from Rome. During the next decade he was increasingly turning to the plays of Shakespeare for suitable subjects and this culminated in his work on Alderman Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, to which he was the main contributor. Other paintings taken from A Midsummer Night’s Dream were Titania and Bottom (Tate Gallery, London), The Awakening of Titania (Kunstmuseum, Winterhur), Puck (Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington), Cobweb (formerly Jeannerat Collection), Titania and Bottom (Kunsthaus, Zurich), and Titania’s Dream (Sandoz Collection).

When this painting was last sold in 1990 it was shown to Professor Gert Schiff and Professor David Weinglass, both of whom endorsed the attribution. It was to be included in Professor Weinglass' revision of Schiff’s catalogue raisonné of Fuseli's work, but the book has not yet been published.