Portrait du peintre Johann Heinrich Füssli

Lawrence's portrait of Johann Heinrich Füssli — Henry Fuseli — painted in 1825 and at the Musée Bonnat-Helleu in Bayonne, captures the most psychologically extreme painter in the Royal Academy at an extraordinary moment: both men were in the final year of their lives, Fuseli dying in April 1825 and Lawrence in January 1830. The two men had been colleagues for decades at the Royal Academy — Fuseli served as Professor of Painting and Keeper, Lawrence as President — and their aesthetic positions were radically different: Fuseli's nightmarish imaginative subjects, drawn from Shakespeare, Milton, and Norse mythology, stood at the opposite pole from Lawrence's social portraiture. Yet both represented a departure from Reynolds's classical idealism: Fuseli toward Gothic fantasy and psychological extremity, Lawrence toward Romantic atmospheric warmth and personal observation. The Musée Bonnat-Helleu, which holds important works by Bonnat, Goya, and other nineteenth-century painters, preserves this late Lawrence portrait in a French regional collection. Fuseli's Swiss-German origins — he was born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zurich in 1741 — and his adoption of an Italianized name upon his arrival in England exemplified the cosmopolitan artistic culture of Georgian London that Lawrence navigated so successfully.

Lawrence portrays his fellow artist with evident respect for Fuseli's fierce intellectual independence. The face is rendered with particular attention to the sharp, penetrating eyes that contemporaries found both brilliant and disturbing, while the relatively austere treatment suits Fuseli's reputation for intellectual rigor over social grace.