Ariel

Ariel from 1800 depicts the sprite from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, one of the supernatural beings that most fascinated Fuseli. His fairy and spirit subjects, rendered with an unsettling combination of beauty and strangeness, influenced later Victorian fairy painting and the development of fantasy illustration. Characteristic of the artist's mature approach, the work displays Michelangelesque muscular figures in extremis, supernatural and nightmare subjects, violent foreshortening, dark Gothic atmosphere, theatrical excess.

Fuseli renders Ariel with the ethereal quality appropriate to a spirit of the air. His characteristic elongated proportions and luminous skin tones create a being that is both beautiful and uncanny.