The large-format composition is from Fuseli’s late oeuvre. With rapid, sketchlike brushstrokes and a sombre palette the painter entwines the three figures from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The sorcerer Busirane holds the young Amoretta prisoner in a dungeon, from which she is freed by Britomart, a virgin in the attire of a knight. Fuseli translates the scene’s drama into an expansive composition, with sweeping movements by the figures, and an extreme torsion of the bodies.