The painter Füssli is honored at the Jacquemart-André museum. Come and discover this exceptional artist from September 16, 2022 to January 23, 2023

Between dream and fantasy

Discover in autumn 2022 the work of the British painter Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825). Through some sixty works from public and private collections, explore the most emblematic themes of the work of Füssli, artist of the imaginary and the sublime. From Shakespearean subjects to representations of dreams, nightmares and apparitions, through mythological and biblical illustrations, Füssli develops a new aesthetic that oscillates between dream and fantasy.

Fascinated by Michelangelo’s compositions

Son of a painter and art historian father, Johann Heinrich Füssli was a pastor for a time and began an artistic career quite late, during a first trip to London, under the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy. After a long stay in Italy, during which he was particularly fascinated by the power of Michelangelo’s compositions, he returned to settle in London at the end of the 1770s. An atypical and intellectual artist, Füssli draws his inspiration from the sources literary works that he passes through the filter of his imagination. He develops in his painting a dreamlike and dramatic language, where the marvelous and the fantastic, the sublime and the grotesque constantly rub shoulders.

The them of the nightmares

Come and explore all of Füssli’s work, to which no monographic exhibition has been devoted in Paris since 1975 : from the representation of Shakespearian theatre, in particular Macbeth, to mythological and biblical stories and to the female figure in its graphic work and finally the themes of the nightmare, a true Füsslian creation, then of dreams and apparitions. Füssli develops a relatively marginal fantasy vein for the time because it circumvents academic rules. It was in 1782 that he presented his first version of Le Cauchemar, an emblematic work of his imagination which truly established his career as a painter.

A rare artist

Elected an associate member of the Royal Academy in 1788, then an academician in 1790, Füssli, while working serially, embodied a search for the sublime that imposed itself on the England of his time. Discover the striking work of this rare artist in French collections, a very original painter who develops a paradoxical work, fueled by an imagination where terror and horror marry, at the aesthetic origin of black romanticism.

Jacquemart André Museum

158 boulevard Haussmann

75008 Paris

https://www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com/fr/fussli-between-dream-and-fantastic