Beyond Elysium – On the print: Caspar Lavater, Felix Hess and Heinrich Fuessli at Spalding’s in Barth, Swedish Pomerania, in the Year 1763, after Heinrich Füssli, Berlin–Basel 1810

This large-format etching in the collection of the Melton Prior Institute, executed by E. S. Henne after a lost grisaille painting by Heinrich Füssli, documents a key event in the culture of Enlightenment friendship in the German-speaking world. Depicted is the visit of the three young Zurichers Johann Caspar Lavater, Felix Hess, and Heinrich Füssli to the Protestant theologian Johann Joachim Spalding in Barth, Pomerania. The context: a temporary escape from Zurich following the publication of a rebellious pamphlet against the local bailiff Grebel.

Lavater, Hess, and Füssli belonged to the circle around Zurich philologist Johann Jakob Bodmer, the early promoter of English literature in Switzerland and mentor to the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Bodmer had defended Klopstock’s Messiah against rationalist critique, and his students similarly distanced themselves from classical Enlightenment rationalism in favour of a pietistically tinged sensibility.

A central visual detail is the sheet pinned to the back wall of the garden pavilion, bearing verses from Klopstock’s Lake Zurich Ode. This allusion to the Zurich cult of friendship functions as a kind of reciprocal visit: the epiphany once experienced by Klopstock and Bodmer at Lake Zurich is now re-enacted in Pomerania – with “Elysium” serving as a cipher for emotional intensity and transregional affinity.

The composition follows the genre of the conversation piece in the manner of Hogarth: the figures are arranged in a tiered spatial stage with clear roles. Lavater is placed at the center as an attentive listener, Spalding appears in an oratorical posture, while Felix Hess mediates between the participants. At the right margin, however, Füssli enters the picture – sketching, but his gaze is not directed at the theological exchange, instead fixating conspicuously on the young woman at the left edge. This gaze betrays a consciously staged ambivalence: the image reporter is no neutral observer, but – very much in the spirit of William Hogarth – acts as a satyr-like, intervening witness. Füssli’s posture closely echoes Hogarth’s self-depiction in The Gate of Calais, where he appears at the image margin as a suspected spy.

Füssli’s libidinal counterpoint to the bourgeois Elysium not only evokes Klopstock’s own infamous breaches of decorum, which had shocked Bodmer and ultimately led to a public rupture between the two; it also foreshadows the heroic boundary transgressions that would mark Füssli’s later artistic career in England. On their way back to Switzerland, the three students made a stop in Quedlinburg, where they met Klopstock in person. Deeply impressed by Füssli’s graphic talent – until then known only for his exalted odes – Klopstock considered commissioning him to illustrate the Messiah.

At the centre of the stage-like setting in the garden pavilion stands Spalding, a key figure of Enlightenment theology. His most influential work, Reflection on the Vocation of Man (1748), outlines an early psychological model based on the permeability between inner character and outward appearance: “If we observe ourselves and others closely, we soon notice how inner disposition is reflected in external bearing, in one’s gaze, and in the tone of voice.”(Spalding, Bestimmung des Menschen, § 19) Spalding’s ideas had a lasting impact on Lavater and were given idiosyncratic popular form in his widely disseminated treatises on physiognomy.

According to the caption of the etching, Füssli painted the original work “in grateful memory” of the eight-month stay, directly on the back wall of the depicted pavilion in Spalding’s garden. When Spalding was appointed to Berlin, the painting was transferred to the city’s Nikolaikirche, where it was still recorded in 1810. At the time of publication, only Füssli was still alive – and the idea of Elysium as a glorious gathering of the virtuous had acquired a broader cultural resonance, not least through Klopstock’s poetry and posthumous veneration.