Forgotten Pyramid

History--and Hollywood film biographies--are full of painters who scrabbled for a living in obscure garrets, and became famous only when dead. But history and Hollywood pass over the many painters admired by all the world who later disappeared because their art lacked lasting power or because a generation lost interest in it.

Last week U.S. readers could learn of one such artist, famed, then forgotten as a personality, and now rediscovered. The 20th Century had a new name for him: though Henry Fuseli antedated the term he was England's first and best Surrealist. When he died in 1825, Sir Thomas Lawrence mourned the passing of a "kindred genius if not greater" than Michelangelo. But by 1868 Fuseli's reputation had so diminished that his most popular painting, The Nightmare, sold for about a pound.

English Art Historian Ruthven (rhymes with driven) Todd has done much to rescue Artist Fuseli from oblivion in a book, Tracks in the Snow (Scribner; $3.75) which was on sale in the U.S. last week.

Pastor to Painter. As his worshipers knew him, Fuseli was "a little white-headed lion-faced man in an old flannel dressing gown tied round his waist with a piece of rope." Brought up to be a Lutheran pastor, he left Zurich soon after his first sermon, on the text: "What will this babbler say?" The babbler had decided that there was a better future in painting. "I do not wish to build a cottage," he wrote in a friend's album, "but to erect a pyramid."

Fuseli's most ambitious fantasies, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, led one critic to assert that he "expressed the terror and the evanescence of the world of phantoms, with a power unequaled by any painter that ever lived." His Nightmare (in which a luminous horse's head thrusts between a sleeping lady's bed curtains) was reproduced everywhere, became almost as well-known as Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Even to William Blake, who had ten times his genius and only one-tenth his contemporary reputation, Fuseli was:

The only Man that e'er I knew Who did not make me almost spew. . . .

Haggling & Tempting. To protect the stomachs of modern readers, Todd reproduces only details of Fuseli's more obscene drawings, made for private consumption. The elaborately coiffeured heads of his procuresses and whores, haggling and tempting, and Fuseli's needle-sharp "domestic" caricatures show him to have been a better draftsman than painter.

Fuseli thought of himself simply as "Poetical," and he once complained that he had "little hope of Poetical painting finding encouragement in England [because] the People are not prepared for it. Portrait with them is everything." Yet while he lived, the pyramid of Fuseli's fame seemed imperishable.

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