Loutherbourg: Mystagogue of the Sublime

From the rather dreary run of Royal Academicians between the death of Gainsborough and the rise of Turner, two artists stand out as having brought to their work originality and the fruits of a wide general culture. Both were emigrants from Continental Europe; both came to art from theology; both were eccentric, even by eighteenth-century standards; and both dealt in that type of pictorial effect which contemporaries had come to regard as sublime. One was Henry Fuseli, and the other Philip James de Loutherbourg.

Fuseli’s stock has risen steadily since the Blake revival; but Loutherbourg, perhaps because he was never a leading figure in Academy life, because he wrote nothing, and, more important, because his surviving work is far less exciting than Fuseli’s, has rarely provided more than a footnote to the life of Turner or to the history of the eighteenth-century stage.