Creativity Quote by Henry Fuseli

"Blake is damned good to steal from" lands like a backhanded compliment sharpened into a manifesto. Fuseli, a swaggering Romantic-era painter with a taste for the theatrical, isn’t confessing petty larceny so much as naming an artistic economy: genius as a resource others are licensed to quarry. The profanity does important work. "Damned" is admiration stripped of polite varnish, the kind of praise you offer when refinement would actually understate the charge.

The subtext is even more pointed because "steal" isn’t "learn" or "be influenced by". Fuseli frames influence as appropriation with intent, acknowledging what every ambitious artist knows and rarely says: innovation often arrives through theft, then gets laundered into originality by craft and nerve. That candor also shields him. If everyone steals from Blake, then any resemblance in Fuseli’s own visionary grotesques, dreamscapes, and charged anatomy isn’t derivative; it’s participation in the highest available lineage.

Context matters: William Blake was admired in pockets but hardly institutionally crowned in his own day, frequently treated as eccentric, even unhinged. Fuseli’s line has the tang of insider recognition - a seasoned artist signaling that the real action is happening off the official stage. It’s also a quiet rebuke to genteel taste. Blake’s imagery is too strange, too mythic, too handmade in its cosmology to be absorbed politely; it demands to be taken, used, risked.

The punchline is that Fuseli elevates Blake by admitting he’s plunderable: not just original, but fertile. In the Romantic imagination, that’s the highest compliment.