The Nightmare

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The Nightmare is a 1781 painting by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825). It is one of Fuseli's best-known works. The painting portrays a sleeping woman draped over the end of a bed, surmounted by an incubus. A horse's head appears at left. The space's interior is contemporary, including a small table on the left, and a stool partially hidden by blankets. The scene's chiaroscuro lighting creates strong contrasts. One art critic, Nicholas Powell, finds that the woman's pose derives from the Vatican Ariadne^[1] and the style of the incubus from figures at Selinunte, an archaeological site in Sicily.

Sleep and dreams were common subjects for Fuseli. His first known painting is Joseph Interpreting the Dreams of the Butler and Baker of Pharaoh (1768), and later he produced The Shepherd's Dream (1798) inspired by John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Richard III Visited by Ghosts (1798) based on Shakespeare's play.

The Nightmare, though, is unique in its lack of reference to religious or literary themes (Fuseli was an ordained minister), being based instead on folklore and the waking dreams experienced by his contemporaries and himself. The work was likely inspired by tales about demons and witches invading the dreams of people who slept alone. In these stories, men were visited by horses or hags, giving rise to the terms "hag-riding" and "mare-riding". Women were believed to engage in sex with the devil. The painting incorporates both of these ideas, depicting a horse's head and a demon crouched on top of the woman. The horse, though, may have been an afterthought, since an early sketch by Fuseli did not include it. Once the painting became popular, engraved versions were underscored by a poem by Erasmus Darwin that began, "on his Night-Mare, thro the evening fog, flits the squab fiend, o'er fen and lake, and bog". Writer H. W. Jansen suggests on that basis that Darwin may have influenced Fuseli's inclusion of the horse. In any case, the painting and poem invoked, for contemporary viewers, the relationship of the horse to nightmares ("night mare"). The etymology of the word "nightmare", however, is not related to horses. Rather, it is derived from mara, a mythological term referring to a spirit sent to torment sleepers.

The painting was first shown at the Royal Academy of London in 1782; it became so popular that Fuseli painted other versions with the same theme. Engravings of the work also circulated widely. Contemporary critics often found the work scandalous, due to its sexual themes. A few years before he painted The Nightmare, Fuseli had fallen passionately in love with one Anna Landholdt, the niece of a friend. His love was unrequited; Landholdt married a family friend shortly after meeting him. H. W. Jansen suggests that the sleeping woman represents Landholdt and that the demon is Fuseli himself. There is an unfinished portrait of a girl on the back of the painting's canvas, which may be the same woman. Marcia Allentuck, author of Women as Sex Objects (1972), argues that the painting's intent is to show female orgasm. This is supported by Fuseli drawings that are sexually overt and even pornographic (e.g., Symplegma of Man with Two Women, 1770–78). Anecdotally, Sigmund Freud had a copy of the painting displayed in his Viennese apartment.

References

^ See image. Accessed 2007-09-29.

Writers and critics mentioned in this article are summarized in:

Russo, Kathleen (1990). "Henry Fuseli" in James Vinson (ed.), International Dictionary of Art and Artists vol. 2, Art. Detroit: St. James Press; pp. 598–99. ISBN 1-55862-001-X.

Notes

Max Eastman visited Sigmund Freud's apartment in Vienna, in 1926. He saw a print of Fuseli's The Nightmare, next to Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson. Ernest Jones chose the 1802 version of Fuseli's painting as the frontispiece of his book On the Nightmare, however neither Freud nor Jones mentioned those paintings in their writings about dreams.
Recent exhibit and publication: Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Imagination. 15 February – 1 May (2006); Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG. [1], ISBN 1854375822, ISBN 9781854375827.

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