Two exhibitions show how a pair of 18th-century painters, James Barry and Henry Fuseli, inspired the modern visual romance with the gothic. This spring the bad boys of British art are making a comeback. Not Damien Hirst and his friends, but the original enfants terribles-Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) and James Barry (1741-1806)-who aimed, above all, to depict extremes of passion and terror in what they called the new art of the Sublime. Barry and Fuseli are hardly household names; indeed since Victorian times they have been virtually ignored. But in the late 18th century, Fuseli, and for a short time Barry also, were prominent members of the young Royal Academy of Arts (RA) and influential professors of painting there.
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