Isaac Fullerc.1606--72
English painter. He was renowned in his day for large historical, mythological and biblical subjects but was also a very able portrait painter. According to Vertue, he studied under Fran?ois Perrier in France c. 1630, and in 1644 he is documented as working in Oxford, at the same time as William Dobson. There he painted altarpieces, including a Resurrection for All Souls College (a wild imitation of Michelangelo, which John Evelyn considered 'too full of nakeds for a chapel'), a Last Judgement for Magdalen College and a Last Supper for Wadham College. None of these works is known to survive. He also copied Dobson's Beheading of John the Baptist, substituting the heads with portraits of his friends. On moving to London, Fuller worked on decorative schemes for churches, taverns and private houses and continued to paint portraits. In 1654 he published a drawing book, Un libro di disegnare, with 15 etched plates, but there are no known copies. Much of his decorative work was destroyed in the Great Fire in 1666, including that in the Painters' Hall and St Mary Abchurch. Vertue admired his erotic life-size Bacchic figures in the Mitre Tavern in Fenchurch Street. Five crudely painted canvases commemorating the Adventures of Charles II after the Battle of Worcester in 1651 (London, N.P.G.) are his only surviving decorative works. Fuller's reputation as a painter rests mainly on three variants of a Rembrandtesque Self-portrait (1670; Oxford, Bodleian Lib.; Oxford, Queen's Coll |
