Fuseli’s Nightmare

Last autumn, a series of public lectures at the PMC investigated key Georgian artworks and their context, impact, and often provocative content. Martin Myrone, who lectured as part of this series, looks anew at receptions and reinventions of The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli. Recordings of all the lectures in “Georgian Provocations Series II” can be watched on our website. Martin is Head of Grants, Fellowships, and Networks at the PMC and was previously a curator at Tate.

There are few works of art which enjoy a cultural life that extends far beyond the relatively rarefied world of art history. Think Mona Lisa, Last Supper, The Scream… these images are reproduced, imitated, lampooned, copied, and referenced so extensively and variously that it would be impossible to fully account for their cultural afterlives. They have, instead, entered the culture as icons – an overused word but one which properly captures how venerating and celebrating images can obscure their original meaning and history. Sometimes the reputations of these images have grown slowly over time, sometimes they have been rediscovered. Images which were once celebrated can also drop out of public view, their former fame now in need of explanation (look up, for instance, Joshua Reynolds’ cloying and bizarre Angel’s Heads).

In this limited canon of pictorial fame, there is a work of notable singularity: Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781). Singular because its fame was instantaneous, and has been continuous since it was first exhibited, in London in 1782. It was also produced by an artist who adopted Britain as his home, and British art is not heavily represented in the international hall of the greatest artistic fame – and then with portraits and landscapes rather than the literary and supernatural subject matter we see with this painting. Singular, too, because critics at the time were decidedly uncertain about the merits of the work, and Fuseli and this picture have never quite been fully rehabilitated in terms of critical reputation.

Thomas Rowlandson, The Covent Garden Night Mare, 1784, etching, 23.9 × 33.5 cm.

Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum (1851,0901.195).

So: what do we see in this painting? A young woman lies on her back in a bed, her arms thrown behind her, and her fair hair spread out, her body language restless. On her stomach squats a naked, darkskinned humanoid creature with pointy ears, who looks back at us with bulging eyes. Behind the bed, a ghostly horse’s head protrudes through a gap in heavy red curtains. A weird dark glitter pervades the scene, giving the squatting creature’s skin a certain reptilian quality, pinpricks of light catching our eye as they appear on a brooch on the woman’s chest, in the bottles on the table, and in the eyes of the horse.

The picture was an immediate sensation when it was exhibited in the Great Room of the Royal Academy of Arts during its annual public exhibition in Somerset House, London in 1782. There were various controversies that year and other works calculated to grab viewers’ attention, but none as controversial as, or with the lasting impact of, Fuseli’s The Nightmare.

Although from a well-established family of artists and art historians, Fuseli had begun training for the church before becoming embroiled in a local controversy and leaving Switzerland in search of creative and political freedom. Initially establishing himself as a translator in London in the 1760s, he turned to visual art and adopted a persona of extreme, eccentric creative genius. Fuseli’s selfpromotion secured him material support to travel to Rome where his fame grew. Back in London in 1779, he spent several years exhibiting literary and mythological works, which had garnered considerable public attention and some consternation.

The exhibition of The Nightmare in 1782 was a new departure for Fuseli: relatively small scale, the painting lacked definite literary or mythological source matter. Instead, it was a dazzling conundrum, combining an array of folkloric, classical, art-historical, and poetic allusions that no one then, or since, has been able to decode satisfactorily. Viewers at the time speculated as to what the painting meant: was this something from a known literary source or just the sick outpouring of a deranged imagination? Art historians and critics have since the mid-twentieth century explored the picture more deeply, referring to interpretive keys from the artist’s sexual desires and experience of unrequited love, to the monstrous and phallic imagery contained with the painting – which makes it a gift to Freudian analysis – and fairy-tale traditions; and the possibility of scientific allusions (either in reference to then-current understandings of sleep paralysis, or the effects of narcotics, stimulants, and diet), as well as to sources in Shakespeare, folklore and antique texts, or images by Salvator Rosa, Guido Reni, and elsewhere within classical sculpture… the list goes on.

George Cruikshank, The Night Mare, 1816, 24.3 × 36.1 cm.

Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum (1868,0808.8351).

But above all, The Nightmare had immediate, visceral power as an image, loaded with metaphorical potential. The leading connoisseur Horace Walpole noted, simply, “Shocking” in the private comment scribbled in his copy of the exhibition catalogue. An official engraving was issued in 1783, but it was being lampooned by caricaturists as early as 1784, when Thomas Rowlandson cast the leading Whig politician Charles James Fox in the role of the oppressed woman. The Nightmare has never left the public imagination since. Intriguingly, the painting itself was rarely seen, being out of the public eye (and long outside of the UK) in a private collection before it was purchased by the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1955. As an image, it was instead mainly known by being caricatured, emulated, and copied.

Its basic cast and composition have proved a favourite formula for satirists down to the present day, mobilised to comment on everything from art criticism to the economy. From the 1810s, we have George Cruikshank making a bad pun and having visual fun with his “Night Mayor” sitting on the stomach of a woman, while in our day Steve Bell cast Angela Merkel in the role of the woman herself, while former French president Nicolas Sarkozy sits on her and a googlyeyed Bismarck watches on. The art critic Brian Sewell was an admirer and collector of Fuseli and well aware of his reputation as an impish and sometimes outrageous writer, so knew what impact it would have when he was cast as the goblin on the striking cover of his collection of essays.

In the field of the moving image, Fuseli’s composition has been utilised numerous times, surely informing the visualisation of vampiric malevolence from Nosferatu (1922) through to “Hammer Horror” and beyond, and serving as the model for a multitude of posters and DVD covers. There have also been cases where the image was mobilised in art-historically informed ways, as with Éric Rohmer’s The Marquise of O (1976), or most obviously Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986). The latter film centres on the night of storytelling in 1816 that led to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, and features an oversized reproduction of the painting itself, hanging over a fireplace at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, and a nightmarish restaging of The Nightmare with Shelley, played by the late Natasha Richardson, oppressed by the imp, brought to life by the stunt performer and actor Kiran Shah. That restaging served, predictably, as the basis of the lead image in marketing and publicity for the film. Closer to our time, we can note that Alex van Warmerdam, the director of Borgman (2013), a psychological drama which evokes folklore around dreams and malevolent night-time invaders and which borrowed Fuseli’s composition visually, is also a painter.

Cover design of Brian Sewell, The Reviews that Caused the Rumpus and Other Pieces (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1994).

Courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing. Cover photograph by Andrea Heselton/Jacket design by Fielding Rowinski.

Film poster, Borgman, directed by Alex van Warmerdam, 2013.

Courtesy of Graniet Film/Photo 12 /Alamy Stock Photo.

The comical, ridiculous, or outrageous tone of much of the imagery which has kept The Nightmare in circulation means that it can be hard to take the image seriously now. Indeed, there may be an element of caricature in the original image; it is not clear how seriously Fuseli expected the image to be taken. Fuseli’s painting has been cheerfully reproduced as an emblem of weird fantasy and a metaphor of oppression. But that very cheerfulness should perhaps disturb us more than it does. What do we see in this painting? A dark-skinned monster molesting a young woman in her sleep. The racial and sexual politics set out by the picture are without doubt unpalatable, and the fact that such iconography has been so readily absorbed into and replicated by mainstream culture deserves, perhaps, some fresh attention.

Film still, Gothic, directed by Ken Russell, 1986.

Courtesy of Cinematic Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.