Portrait du peintre Johann Heinrich Füssli

Johann Heinrich Füssli — known in England as Henry Fuseli — was one of the most original and unsettling painters of the late eighteenth century, famous for The Nightmare and his illustrations to Shakespeare and Milton. Lawrence and Fuseli were colleagues at the Royal Academy and moved in overlapping artistic circles. Painted in 1825, near the end of Lawrence's life, this portrait at the Musée Bonnat-Helleu may be posthumous, as Fuseli died in 1825.

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.