Mesmerising and eye-opening: Courtauld Gallery’s Fuseli and the Modern Woman reviewed

It’s not until you see this exhibition of drawings by Henry Fuseli that you realise that most artists have really not done anything like justice to women’s hair. Fuseli was obsessed with it, particularly that of his wife Sophia, a former artists’ model 20-plus years his junior. Hers was wildly extravagant even by the standards of the time – late 18th, early 19th century.

For most art buffs, Fuseli, one of the most idiosyncratic artists of his age, is best known for ‘The Nightmare’, his lurid Gothic painting of a curvaceous sleeping woman with a demon squatting on her belly, shown in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1782; the drawings in this Courtauld exhibition show another side.

All his women have mesmerising coiffures, from two respectable sisters in his native Zurich, to a young Spanish woman. Here the sketch is usefully juxtaposed with an illustrative picture of a Roman matron from the 1st century AD with similar elaborate curls; in an age where classicism was all the rage, one way for women to imitate antiquity was by replicating the elaborate hairstyles of imperial Rome.