Johann Heinrich Füssli

Johann Heinrich Füssli, known in England as Henry Fuseli, was a Swiss-born painter famous for dark, dramatic scenes drawn from dreams and imagination. Born in Zurich in 1741, he settled in Britain, where he became a prominent and eccentric figure in the art world. His most famous painting, The Nightmare, shows a sleeping woman with a demon crouched on her chest, an unsettling image that made him instantly notorious.

He loved subjects from Shakespeare, Milton, and myth, filling his work with heroic figures, terror, and the supernatural. His imaginative, sometimes disturbing vision made him a forerunner of both Romanticism and later fantasy art. Fuseli's haunting, theatrical paintings still exert a strange power over viewers today.