Art: Painters of the Abyss

Two elegant portraitists, Reynolds and Gainsborough, ruled the calm and decorous art world of 18th Century London. But there was also an opposition, most notably represented by young, deeply religious William Blake with his alternately angelic and demonic visions. Others in the opposition ducked the angels; they preferred the Pit.

In London’s Architectural Review, British Scholar Geoffrey Grigson sets out to make a case for three such painters, all born in 1741: Henry Fuseli, John Henry Mortimer, and James Barry. “They share,” Grigson says, “in the sense of turmoil, of the black and red river, of the black and cavernous and jagged abyss . . .” In plainer language, all three painted more or less high-toned horror pictures.

¶ Fuseli alternated pornographic drawings (for private circulation among his friends) with surrealistic nightmares of horses invading ladies’ bed-curtains and grim, grand-scale illustrations of Greek and Norse myths. To suggest the painter’s impact on his time, Grigson quotes two of Fuseli’s contemporaries. “His look is lightning, his word is thunder, his jest death and his vengeance hell,” wrote one. “His neighborhood is unbearable.” The other, a fellow artist, called him “a monster in design; his women are all strumpets, and his men all banditti, with the action of galvanized frogs [but] no man had the power like Fuseli of arousing the dormant spirit of youth . . .”

¶ Mortimer had one quality Fuseli lacked: crass humor. Along with a doleful Caliban and a tumultuous Hercules Slaying the Hydra, he drew such fantasies as an orchestra of flatulent beasts, which must have seemed capricious and vulgar to all but his best friends. Yet, says Grigson, Fuseli and Mortimer “drank to different depths out of the same brew and looked together into the abyss. Mortimer [like Fuseli] wildly, demoniacally, lit up, the eyes, accentuated them in shade, filled them with the gleam of interior flame and power.”

¶ Barry was the proudest and least able of the three. “The principal merit of painting,” he once wrote, “is its address to the mind.” Because he continually asserted his conviction that most other British painters were mindless, they expelled him from the Royal Academy. They also took great satisfaction in sneering at his half-mystical allegories and his absurd Death of General Wolfe (in which all the figures were shown classically nude).

William Blake, 16 years the junior of Fuseli, Mortimer and Barry, drew, maintains Grigson, as badly as Barry—and “Little-Lambishly” besides. Blake once showed a drawing to Fuseli with the boast that the Virgin Mary herself had appeared to him and said it was very fine. Defiantly Blake added: “What can you say to that?” “Say?” exclaimed Fuseli. “Why, nothing—only that her ladyship has not immaculate taste.”

“Blake’s coat is too long,” Grigson concludes, “and he can spare an inch or two for his now destitute forerunners.” But Blake well deserves his long coat. Like a great artist, and unlike Fuseli, Mortimer and Barry, he pictured the heights with as much vision as he did the abyss.