Johann Heinrich Füssli

Füssli was born on 7 February 1741 in Zurich, Switzerland, the son of the painter Johann Caspar Füssli. He was educated at the Collegium Carolinum in Zurich, where he received a classical education in Greek, Latin, and modern languages under Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger, and trained for the ministry. Political conflict in Zurich forced him to leave the city in the early 1760s. He traveled through Berlin before settling in London in 1764, where he initially worked as a writer, translator, and critic.

Encouraged by Joshua Reynolds to pursue painting, Füssli left England in 1770 to study in Italy, remaining mainly in Rome until 1778. There he immersed himself in classical antiquity and the work of Michelangelo, developing the muscular, dramatically foreshortened figure style that would define his mature work. Back in London by 1779, he exhibited The Nightmare at the Royal Academy in 1782, a sensation that made his name. Later in the decade he contributed Shakespeare subjects to the publisher John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1788 and a full Academician in 1790. In 1799 he became Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy and mounted his own ambitious Milton Gallery in Pall Mall, London, illustrating the poetry of John Milton. In 1816 the sculptor Antonio Canova named him an honorary member of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, alongside John Flaxman and Thomas Lawrence.

Füssli died on 16 April 1825 at Putney Hill, London, at the house of the Countess of Guildford, aged 84, and was buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral.

Füssli's contemporaries and later critics consistently single out the intensity of his imagination. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, an early collector of his drawings, is reported to have remarked on the sheer fury in Füssli's art, and Antonio Canova's decision to name him an honorary member of Rome's Accademia di San Luca in 1816, alongside Flaxman and Lawrence, reflects the esteem in which his peers held him. Art historians place him at the hinge between Neoclassicism and Romanticism, noting his influence on William Blake and, much later, on Symbolist and Surrealist painters drawn to his treatment of dream and terror. The recurring critical theme is his willingness to distort anatomy and scale for psychological effect, a choice some 18th century critics found extreme but which later generations read as prophetic.

Füssli's market is that of a canonical but thinly traded Old Master. His auction high stands at USD 3,510,000, achieved at Christie's New York in 2021, a price Christie's own artist overview describes as a world auction record for him. Published sources differ on both the exact sale date and the title of the record-setting canvas, naming it variously as The Nightmare and The Incubus Leaving Two Young Women, which is not unusual for an artist who painted several closely related versions of his best-known subjects. Below that record, specialist Old Master dealers have placed the working range for his paintings roughly between USD 250,000 and USD 3,000,000, reflecting a market driven by scarcity and museum-quality condition rather than by frequent turnover.

No catalogue raisonne of Füssli's paintings was confirmed in research for this profile, so provenance research typically runs through museum records, Royal Academy exhibition history, and the handful of Old Master specialists and auction houses that regularly handle his work. Because he painted multiple versions of his signature subjects, buyers should expect careful cataloguing questions around title, date, and version before any acquisition. There is currently no gallery or estate formally representing his work; it circulates through museum deaccessions, private collections, and the major international auction houses, which is the main reason his public sale record remains comparatively short and each result carries outsized weight.