Creator story
Surprising fact
The Nightmare, with its demon crouched on a sleeping woman, so haunted audiences that Fuseli painted several versions; a print of it reportedly hung in Freud's apartment.
Source: Wikipedia / WikimediaRomanticism
Henry Fuseli
Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) was a Swiss-born Romantic painter who specialised in the dark, the dreamlike and the supernatural. His nightmarish The Nightmare became a sensation and an emblem of the irrational.
Fuseli's obsession with dream and terror anticipated Symbolism, Surrealism and the modern fascination with the unconscious.
- Painted The Nightmare, a sensation of horror and the erotic uncanny.
- Drew on Shakespeare, Milton and his own feverish imagination.
- A forerunner of Symbolism and the art of the unconscious.
Key works
A key work by Henry Fuseli
These works make it easiest to see how the artist changed form, content, and the very way art could exist in culture.
1781
The Nightmare
The Nightmare is a 1781 oil painting by the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. It shows a woman with her arms thrown below her, in deep sleep as she undergoes a nightmare as an almost hidden horse looks on as a demonic and ape-like incubus crouches on her chest.