Enfilade

From Reaktion Books with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Christopher Baker, Creator of Nightmares: Henry Fuseli’s Art and Life (London: Reaktion Books, 2024), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1789149302, £30 / $45.

A critical biography of the eighteenth-century painter.

Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) was one of the eighteenth century’s most provocative and inventive artists. He is best known for his painting The Nightmare, which created a new form of terrifying gothic imagery for the Romantic age. This engaging study of the artist’s career unveils Fuseli’s complexities, navigating contradictions between literary and painted works, sacred and secular themes, and traditional patronage versus the new era of competitive exhibitions and intense criticism. Plotting Fuseli’s trajectory from Zurich to Paris, Rome and ultimately London, where he secured long-lasting fame, the artist is revealed as an astute publicity seeker and self-proclaimed genius who transformed himself from a priest to an Enlightenment writer, a ‘mad’ mercurial force in the art world, and finally a revered teacher.

Christopher Baker is Editor of The Burlington Magazine and an Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh. He was previously a Director at the National Galleries of Scotland and has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and European art.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  Origins in Zurich
2  A European Man of Letters
3  The Impact of Rome
4  The Nightmare
5  The Vagaries of Fame
6  Creative Friendships
7  Legacies

References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index