The following critique from the pen of Allan Cunningham, gives a good idea of Fuseli's abilities as an artist. "His main wish was to startle and astonish. It was his ambition to be called Fuseli the daring and the imaginative, the illustrator of Milton and Shakspeare, the rival of Michael Angelo. His merits are of no common order. He was no timid or creeping adventurer in the region of art, but a man peculiarly bold and daring—who rejoiced only in the vast, the wild, and the wonderful, and loved to measure himself with any subject, whether in the heaven above, the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth. The domestic and humble realities of life he considered unworthy of his pencil, and employed it only on those high or terrible themes where imagination may put forth all her strength, and fancy scatter all her colors. He associated only with the demi-gods of verse, and roamed through Homer, and Dante, and Shakspeare, and Milton, in search of subjects worthy of his hand; he loved to grapple with whatever he thought too weighty for others; and assembling round him the dim shapes which imagination readily called forth, he sat brooding over the chaos, and tried to bring the whole into order and beauty. His coloring is like his design; original; it has a kind of supernatural hue, which harmonizes with many of his subjects—the spirits of the other world and the hags of hell are steeped in a kind of kindred color, which becomes their natural characters. His notion of color suited the wildest of his subjects; and the hue of Satan and the lustre of Hamlet's Ghost are part of the imagination of those supernatural shapes."