Füssli, the Realm of Dreams and the Fantastic

Henry Fuseli, Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent (1790), Royal Academy of Arts Collections, London.

Füssli, the Realm of Dreams and the Fantastic features sixty works from public and private collections by Henry Füssli (1741–1825), the artist of the imaginary and the sublime. From Shakespearean themes to representations of dreams, nightmares, and apparitions, and mythological and Biblical illustrations, Füssli forged a new aesthetic that shifted between reality and the fantastic.

The son of a painter and art historian, Henry Füssli was trained as a priest and started his artistic career relatively late. During a first trip to London, he was influenced by the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds. After a long stay in Italy, during which he was fascinated, inparticular, by the power of Michelangelo’s works, he settled in London at the end of the 1770s. An intellectual artist, Füssli drew his inspiration from the literary sources that he interpreted imaginatively. In his paintings he developed a dreamlike and dramatic pictorial language, with its blend of the marvellous and the fantastic, the sublime and the grotesque.