Henry, an eminent painter and writer on art, was born at Zurich in Switzerland, 7th February 1741. His father was John Caspar Fuselli, an artist of some note, and author of Lives of the Helectic Painters. This parent destined his son for the church, and with this view sent him to the Caroline College of his native town, where he received an excellent classical education. One of his schoolmates there was Lavater, with whom he formed an intimate friendship. After taking orders in 1761, Fuseli was obliged to leave his country for a while in consequence of having aided Lavater to expose an unjust magistrate, whose family, however, was still powerful enough to make its vengeance felt. He first travelled through Germany, and then visited England, where he supported himself for some time by literary hack-work. At this time he had the good fortune to become acquainted with Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom he showed his drawings. By Sir Joshua's advice he now devoted himself wholly to art. In 1770 he made an art-pilgrimage to Italy, where he remained till 1778, in which year he returned to England, taking Zurich on his way. He found a commission awaiting him from Alderman Boydell, who was then organizing his celebrated Shakespeare gallery. Fuseli painted a number of pieces for this patron, and about this time published an English edition of Lavater's work on physiognomy. He likewise gave Cowper some valuable assistance in preparing the translation of Homer. In 1788 Fuseli married, and soon after became an Associate of the Royal Academy. Two years later he was promoted to the full dignity of an Academician. In 1799 he exhibited a series of paintings from subjects furnished by the works of Milton, with a view to forming a Milton gallery, corresponding to Boydell's Shakespeare gallery. In that year he was appointed professor of painting to the Academy. Four years afterwards he was chosen keeper. In 1805 he brought out an edition of Pilkington's Lives of the Painters, which, however, did not add much to his reputation. Canova, when on his visit to England, was much taken with Fuseli's works, and on returning to Rome in 1817 caused him to be elected a member of the first class in the Academy of St Luke. Fuseli died at Putney Hill, 16th April 1825, at the advanced age of eighty-four, and was buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral.

Though under any circumstances Fuseli would probably have made himself a great name in art, yet he enjoyed peculiar advantages in making his appearance at a time when English art was beginning to recover from the degradation into which it had been gradually falling since the days of Rubens and Vandyke. Portrait-painting had been restored to its ancient dignity by Sir Joshua Reynolds; the great school of British landscape had been founded by Wilson and Gainsborough; but historical painting had nothing to show except a few specimens from the pencil of Reynolds, some hasty and superficial yet powerful and promising pieces by Mortimer, and the solemnly correct and tamely cold productions of West. The very qualities that were wanting in these men, Fuseli possessed in profusion. He had a daring invention, was original, fertile in resource, and ever aspiring after the highest forms of excellence. His mind was capable of grasping and realizing the loftiest conceptions, which, however, he often spoiled on the canvas by exaggerating the due proportions of the parts, and throwing his figures into attitudes of fantastic and over-strained contortions. In the treatment of his subjects, which he delighted to select from the region of the supernatural, he pitched everything upon an ideal scale, believing a certain amount of exaggeration necessary in the higher branches of historical painting. In this theory he was confirmed by the study of Michael... Angelo's works and the marble statues of the Monte Carlo, which, when at Rome, he used often to contemplate in the evening, relieved against a murky sky or illuminated by lightning. But this idea was by him carried out to absurd extremes, not only in the forms, but also in the attitudes of his figures; and the violent and intemperate action which he often displays destroys the grand effect which many of his pieces would otherwise produce. A striking illustration of this occurs in his famous picture of "Hamlet breaking from his attendants to follow the Ghost." Hamlet, it has been said, looks as though he would burst his clothes with convulsive cramps in all his muscles. Even in pieces where calmness and simplicity are aimed at, the figures are sometimes twisted into monstrous convolutions, or twisted into the most abrupt and singular angles. This intemperance is the grand defect of nearly all Fuseli's compositions. On the other hand, however, his paintings are never either languid or cold. His figures are always full of life and earnestness, and seem to have an object in view which they follow with rigid intensity. Like Rubens he excelled in the art of setting his figures in motion. Though the lofty and terrible was his proper sphere, Fuseli had a fine perception of the ludicrous. The grotesque humour of his fairy scenes, especially those taken from the Midsummer Night's Dream, is in its way quite as remarkable as the poetic power of his more ambitious works. As a colourist Fuseli has but small claims to distinction. He scorned to set a palette as most artists do. He merely dashed his tints recklessly over it. Not unfrequently he used his paints in the form of a dry powder, which he rubbed up with his pencil either with oil, or with turpentine, or gold size, regardless of the quantity, and depending for accident on the general effect. This recklessness may perhaps be explained by the fact that he did not begin to paint in oil till he was twenty-five years of age. Despite these drawbacks, however, Fuseli possessed the elements of a great painter. He was an enthusiastic lover of his art, and had he enjoyed a better training, and adopted a more temperate habit of thinking, he might have taken rank with the masters of the sublime Italian school, which he so deeply admired. Fuseli's general powers of mind were great. He was a thorough master of French, Italian, English, and German, and could write in all these tongues with equal facility and vigour, though he preferred German as the vehicle of his thoughts. His writings contain perhaps the best art-criticism that English literature can show. Many interesting anecdotes of Fuseli, and his relations to contemporary artists, are given in his Life by John Knowles, who also edited his works in 3 vols. 8vo, London, 1831.