Puritan Interior

[T]he Pickman family came of good Puritan stock, which had been cooked up by the European Anabaptist movement and simmered under the tyranny of Queen Elizabeth I before boiling over to spill across the Atlantic on the decks of the Mayflower and indelibly discolor the pages of American history. (Perhaps it should be explained that Anabaptism was a reaction against Baptism, a doctrine peculiar to occidental monotheism dictating that prospective Christians needed to be immersed in water in order for them to see God; ­Royal edict demanded that the baptee must remain in an upright position throughout the process, thus necessitating the deployment of the baptor's foot to keep the baptee's head submerged until perception of divinity had been achieved. The Anabaptists rejected this, favouring instead the method of suspending the anabaptee by the ankles, thereby avoiding the concomitant problem of rust forming on the buckles they used to fasten their footwear, being unable to tie their shoelaces. Or perhaps it should not.)

Fuseli

Henry Fuseli was born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zürich, Switzerland, on February 7, 1741 as the second of eighteen children to Johannes Kaspar Füssli (1706-1782), a painter of landscapes and portraits and author of Lives of the Helvetic Painters. Originally intended by his father for the priesthood, he attended Zürich’s Caroline College where he studied under Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698-1783), an early proponent of the Sturm-und-Drang movement (1760-1780), and befriended deacon, poet and physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801), author of Physiognomische Fragmente zu Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis.
[...]
Füssli was most pleased to have arrived in England, the land of his beloved Shakespeare (as a teenager, he had translated Macbeth into German), immediately Anglicizing his first two names into ‘John Henry” because he knew how Englishmen were, and Italicizing his last name into “Fuseli” because he knew how Englishwomen were.
[…]
Indeed, Fuseli seems to have inspired such statements throughout his life. Returning from Italy via Zürich, he revisited his old fellow-polemicist Lavater, who had once described him thusly: “His spirits are hurricane, his servants flames of fire. He goes on the wings of the wind. His laugh is the mockery of Hell, and his love a murderous lightning flash.” While Lavater may have admired such qualities in a comrade-in-arms against corruption, he apparently found them unsuitable in a potential mate for his niece Anna Landholt, whom Fuseli attempted to court before returning to London.
[...]
In 1788 he wed one of his models, Sophia Rawlins (dates unknown), became an Associate of the Royal Academy of London, started writing essays and reviews for the radical Analytical Review, and frequented the home of its publisher Joseph Johnson (1738-1809) in the company other contributors such as journalist, philosopher and novelist William Godwin (1756-1836; he later married Mary Wollstonecraft, vide infra), inventor, intellectual, radical, pamphleteer, revolutionary and rabble-rouser Thomas Paine (1737-1809), theologian, educator, political theorist and natural philosopher Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), physician, inventor, natural philosopher and poet Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802, who had written a short poem about Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare entitled “Night-Mare,” which he later expanded upon in his long poem The Loves of the Plants (1789), found in his book The Botanic Garden: A Poem in Two Parts (1825)), and writer, feminist and unnatural philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797, whose portrait he painted and with whom he planned a trip to Paris until Sophia Rawlins (m. 1788 to Swiss-born painter John Henry Fuseli (1741-1825)) found out; she would later marry William Godwin, vide supra, and give birth to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (a. k. a. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a. k. a. “Miss Godwin,” a. k. a. “Mrs. Shelley,” 1797-1851, vide infra, wife of Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)), who would later give birth to three dead children, one live one, and Frankenstein, a Bavarian physick who gave birth to the creature commonly referred to as “Frankenstein,” one of the most enduring and endearing creatures known to Hollywood, thus giving birth to innumerable sequels and remakes, a natal cascade so fraught with complexity that it caused Mary Wollstonecraft to perish from complications caused by childbirth not long thereafter), before being promoted to Academician two years later.
Fuseli’s most famous work from this period – or, indeed, from any of his periods – is The Nightmare (1781), which “excited … an uncommon degree of interest” upon its unveiling at the Royal Academy in 1782 and is unique among his work for being devoid of any overt reference to literary or religious themes. Historians of art, and of other subjects, speculate that this infamous canvas was inspired by Anna Landholt’s rejection of his proposal two years earlier; on the back of the canvas is an unfinished portrait of a girl thought to be Landholt. In fact, Fuseli wrote,

Last night I had her in bed with me ― tossed my bedclothes hugger-mugger ― wound my hot and tight-clasped hands about her ― fused her body and soul together with my own ― poured into her my spirit, breath and strength. Anyone who touches her now commits adultery and incest! She is mine, and I am hers. And have her I will…

in a letter to her uncle, dated 1779.