About this work
The canvas holds three figures suspended in grief, stripped of any background or setting. Two young lovers — Huon and Amanda — mourn the death of a bearded old man, the hermit Alphonso.
Fuseli enacts the scene with sweeping lines in dark hues, without any hint of surroundings; the garments are theatrical, and Amanda's white dress stands out between the brown tones of the two men, with a faint shimmer of promise falling upon the couple.
The simplification of forms, typical of the artist, aims to attain an increased expressiveness. The composition is claustrophobically intimate — there is nowhere for the eye to escape, no landscape to soften the weight of loss, only three bodies locked in a moment of reckoning.
The painting is an oil on canvas created in 1804–1805.
It depicts the moment when the romantic hero Huon comforts his lover Amanda as they discover the body of the goodly hermit Alphonso — painted as one of a series of twelve canvases commissioned by the publisher Caddell & Davis as illustrations to a new English edition of Christoph Martin Wieland's epic German poem *Oberon* (1780).
The theme is taken from book 9, verse 39 of that fantastical, entangled adventure story set in the Middle Ages: on an enchanted island, the wise hermit Alphonso had become the mentor of the young knight and his lover, the daughter of the caliph.
The death of the hermit means further trials for the young couple before their final union — in the *Oberon* saga, this is a decisive moment.
Throughout his life, Fuseli drew inspiration from great works of world literature, having previously painted series illustrating Shakespeare, Milton, and Homer — all published as commercial ventures in series of prints. The *Oberon* paintings mark the last of these grand literary cycles, made at the height of his institutional authority as both Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy.
This is a painting for rooms that welcome confrontation. Its vertical format — approximately 60 by 44 centimetres — concentrates the drama into a tight, almost shrine-like space. It works best where it can be met at eye level: a study, a reading room, or a dark-walled interior where books and thought share the walls with art. The viewer it speaks to is one drawn to literature as much as painting, to the Romantic conviction that grief and beauty are inseparable — that loss is, itself, a turning point. Fuseli gives that conviction a form you cannot look away from.
