Getty Museum
An Old Man Murdered by Three Younger Men
Creator
Johann Heinrich FuseliSwiss Artist · 1741–1825
All works by this person →Johann Heinrich Fuseli "used to dab his beastly brush into the oil, and sweeping round the palette in the dark, take up a great lump of white, red, or blue, as it might be and plaster it over a shoulder or face. . . . I found him the most grotesque mixture of literature, art, scepticism, indelicacy, profanity, and kindness," remembered a former student. A painter's son, Fuseli grew up immersed in
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- early 1770s
- Medium
- Pen and black ink and gray wash
- Culture
- Swiss
- Department
- Drawings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Johann Heinrich Fuseli once told student Benjamin Haydon: "[A] subject should interest, astonish, or move; if it did none of these it was worth nothing, by God." Dramatically lit behind dark, parted curtains, a group of figures encircle an old man and brutally stab him. Starkly opposing areas of dark and light intensify the drama: the paper's brilliant whiteness contrasts with the black curtains and the murderers' menacing shadows. This drawing typifies the horrific scenes in which Fuseli specialized. Fuseli selected his themes from literature, but his idiosyncratic interpretation can make it difficult to identify exact subjects. The curtain creates the stagelike effect, which, along with the linear, abstract representation of monumental figures, recall Fuseli's Shakespearean drawings of the early 1770s, made during his years in Italy. The classicizing representation of the figures may have been inspired by the Hellenistic sculpture *Niobid Group* in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence.
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