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THE NIGHTMARE: FUSELI AND THE ART OF HORROR
Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare is the consummate image of sexual terror,
which has inspired mystery and speculation for generations.
Ever since it was first exhibited to the public, at the annual Royal Academy
exhibition of 1782, The Nightmare has been an icon of horror. It shows a
young woman lying in a restless sleep in her bedroom, oppressed by a
foul-looking imp which sits on her stomach. To the left, a horse glares out
from the gloom. The original visitors to the Academy exhibition in 1782
were shocked by the subject matter – but also intrigued. The Academy
exhibitions in the late eighteenth century were dominated by portraits,
landscape paintings, or scenes illustrating literature and history. The
Nightmare did not fit any of these categories. What did this painting really
show? What did it mean? Was it an allegory of some kind, or simply a sick
fantasy? The art critics were mystified; one complained, ‘The Nightmare,
by Mr Fuseli, like all his productions has strong marks of genius about it;
but hag-riding is too unpleasant a thought to be agreeable to anyone’.
Another remarked that ‘there is a wildness of conception in Mr Fuseli’s
picture of the Night Shade at the Royal Academy, which teems with that
usual concomitant of genius, inaccuracy’.
The painting had created a real stir, exactly as Fuseli would have wanted.
This Swiss-born painter had moved to England in the mid-1760s, and tried
to establish himself as a translator and writer. But he turned to the visual
arts around 1770, encouraged ( by his own account) by Sir Joshua
Reynolds, the newly-appointed president of the Royal Academy – and
spent most of the following decade in Italy, studying ancient art and the
Old Masters, and gaining a reputation for his wild imagination among
connoisseurs and fellow artists. Now, back in England, he made a
concerted effort to make his name as a painter. In previous exhibitions he
had displayed large, dynamic compositions of scenes from Shakespeare
and Milton. These were eye-grabbing, powerfully visual works, and had
been fairly well-received by the critics and the public. But in 1782, he risked
his reputation by showing only this single, rather small, but
unconventional painting.
Over 55, 000 people went to the exhibition in 1782 - this when the
population of London was only about 750,000. Many more would have
read about the painting in the newspapers and magazines, and still more
could have seen the print reproducing the image that was published in the
