To get to Henry Fuseli’s drawings and watercolours you have to climb to the very top of the “stare” case at the Courtauld, which in his day was the home of the Royal Academy and its annual exhibition. This elliptically spiralling masterpiece of Georgian architecture got its nickname from an outrageous print by Fuseli’s contemporary Thomas Rowlandson called The Exhibition “Stare” Case. It shows women tumbling, their dresses flying up to reveal their bottoms, while a bunch of depraved old men watch happily.
It’s worth glancing at the reproduction of this satire on your way up as it provides a context for Fuseli’s enthusiastically perverse portrayals of women. He may seem furtive and odd, yet in his own time he was anything but. Fuseli was hugely successful, a Swiss artist who migrated to Britain, made his name with his 1781 gothic painting The Nightmare, and became Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools.
