Agenda

“I stood in the Kunsthaus in Zurich, staring at the pictures by Henry Fuseli & wondering who this painter was that accidentally invented expressionism a hundred years early. I hovered at the edge of the gallery, dodging tour groups and reading his Wikipedia entry on my phone; and when I got to the bit about the strange, uncertain ménage à trois he and his wife had with the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, I knew I wanted to read a book about them. Amazingly, there wasn't one”*

London, 1789. The Swiss-born painter Henry Fuseli is at the height of his fame, newly married, and on the verge of being elected to the Royal Academy. But as the ‘Wild Swiss’ works on his pictures of dark, dreamlike eroticism, he is drawn into a network of radical thinkers who are eagerly following the revolutions in America and France – among them the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. As Fuseli struggles to find his way in a London seething with fog, streetwalkers, dismal poverty and staggering displays of wealth, the stage is set for a showdown between Enlightenment reason and the relentless pull of human desire.

“A painter on the margins of society”….  “A woman determined to change the world”…. and “a country on the brink of revolution.”….

Warwick Wise is a writer and video journalist originally from London. A former reporter with the BBC and Agence France-Presse, he covered events from the Libyan Civil War to the Haitian earthquake before becoming a video storyteller at a Fortune 500 multinational. He lives in Switzerland, and His Devilish Art is his first novel.

This event will take an interview format, with Wise discussing his life, the book and its evolution, and reading extracts from it. Whilst the event is free, places are limited and we do ask that you buy a 3€ voucher, redeemable at the event. 

Drinks and Snacks will be served.