Reclining Nude and Woman at the Piano

The painter of witches and demons spent the turn of the century fixed on something entirely of his own moment, the fashionable modern woman and her hair. Around 1799 Fuseli made this hushed interior. A nude lies stretched along a couch while a second woman, upright and formally dressed, plays at a keyboard. The 1790s were the great age of the built-up coiffure, powdered and raised over wire, horsehair and wool and then crowned with feathers, and Fuseli studied these constructions as closely as he ever studied a monster. Many of the sharp, self-possessed women in this strand of his work were drawn from his wife, Sophia Rawlins, a former artist's model he had married in 1788. The seated woman's tall, sculpted hair is the thing he lingers on, set against the bare, relaxed body on the couch beside her.