Wilhelm Heinrich Füssli was a Swiss portrait painter and draughtsman. He painted in oils and pastels.
Füssli, scion of the Zurich bell founder and artist family Füssli, was the only child of the Zurich lawyer, politician and writer Wilhelm Füssli and his wife Anna, née Locher (* 1807). He grew up in a household with a keen interest in art; his father was a dilettante painter. With the support of his parents, he studied at the Städel Institute in Frankfurt am Main from 1846 to 1849 as a pupil of Jakob Becker, who was a painter in the style of the Düsseldorf School of Painting. From 1849, he studied for a short time at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and in the studio of the history and portrait painter Johann Baptist Berdellé in Munich. However, the then modern painting of the Munich School did not appeal to him. In 1850 he traveled to Venice. In Munich, Füssli met the painter Oswald Sickert, with whom he became close friends. The two young artists went to Paris together in 1853, where they worked in Thomas Couture's studio and studied masterpieces in the Louvre. Füssli spent some time in Munich again between 1855 and 1860. In 1860, he married Emma Eleonora Viktoria Rosalie von Möllenbeck (* 1835) from Karlsruhe, the daughter of a legation councillor from Baden. He then settled in Italy, first in Florence, then in Rome, where he lived in 1862 and from 1868 to 1870, and later again in 1892/1893. Soon after the turn of the century, an eye condition affected his work. The sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, who was in contact with him in Italy, created a portrait bust of him.
As a sought-after portraitist, Füssli traveled to Switzerland and Germany several times. In addition to portraits, his oeuvre includes figure and landscape studies as well as sketches and caricatures. Füssli participated in Swiss and international exhibitions (Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Munich, Paris, Vienna). A special exhibition organized at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1901 showed around 40 portraits from the years 1853 to 1893. He was also represented at the Centennial Exhibition of German Art.
Füssli's daughter Anna Eleonora (1874-1941), born in Karlsruhe and known as Nora, became the wife of the farmer Werner von Siemens (1856-1900), son of the industrialist Carl Heinrich von Siemens, in his second marriage in 1895, and in 1923, in his third marriage, she became the wife of Werner Ferdinand von Siemens (1885-1937), son of the industrialist Georg Wilhelm von Siemens, after having been married to Prince Malcolm Khan from 1905 to 1908 and to the Italian General Luigi Fecia di Cossato (1841-1921) from 1910 to 1921.
