Romanticism

The Nightmare

An incubus crouches on the sleeping woman's chest while a pale-eyed mare pushes its head through the curtain — one of the first paintings in Western art to stage a nightmare itself.

Henry Fuseli · 1781

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Intro source: Wikipedia (EN)

Author

Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit

Fuseli painted it in 1781 and showed it at the Royal Academy the next year; the sensation was such that he made several versions himself, and engravings after it sold in huge numbers.

Highlights

Facts & legends

An incubus crouches on the sleeping woman's chest while a pale-eyed mare pushes its head through the curtain — one of the first paintings in Western art to stage a nightmare itself.
Fuseli painted it in 1781 and showed it at the Royal Academy the next year; the sensation was such that he made several versions himself, and engravings after it sold in huge numbers.
On the reverse of one version Fuseli painted a woman's portrait, thought to be a young woman who had rejected him — which has made the picture read as revenge staged in a dream.
Sigmund Freud is said to have kept a reproduction of The Nightmare on the wall of his consulting rooms in Vienna.
The image lodged in popular culture almost immediately: within a few years caricaturists were recycling its composition for political satire.

Source: Wikipedia (EN)

More details Who sits on the sleeper's chest, why a horse emerges from the curtain, and how The Nightmare travelled from Royal Academy sensation to prints, satire and Freud's apartment.

Painting a sensation

Not simply what the woman sees

The DIA notes that Fuseli evokes the feeling of a nightmare: weight, panic and disturbing familiarity.

The incubus looks at us while the sleeper remains unreachable.

Fuseli exhibited the painting at the Royal Academy in 1782 without a guiding literary episode. For an artist steeped in Shakespeare and Milton this was unusual: viewers could not check the image against a familiar plot. Woman, incubus, and horse form a convincing event without belonging to one stable story, much like a dream that resists retelling.

Incubus on the chest

Folklore resembles sleep paralysis

An incubus was believed to press upon a sleeper. Modern viewers recognize paralysis, pressure and sensed presence.

Fuseli made an inexpressible bodily experience visible without painting a medical diagram.

The title activates an older meaning of nightmare. The 'mare' could be a night spirit believed to press a sleeper as well as the pictured horse. Fuseli turns language into structure: the heavy incubus sits on the chest while a white-eyed head bursts through the curtain. A pun becomes pressure at centre and shock at the edge.

Horse in darkness

The title becomes a visual pun

The old mare in nightmare meant an evil spirit, not a horse, yet Fuseli exploits the modern sound by adding both demon and mare.

Its blank eyes turn the bedroom into dream-space.

The woman's pose is theatrical and physically disturbing: head and arms drop below the bed, throat exposed, agency lost. The Detroit Institute stresses that the image suggests how the nightmare feels rather than what she sees. Monsters can therefore be external visitors or shapes assumed by helplessness.

Horror became a hit

Print carried it beyond the exhibition

Painted in 1781 and shown at the Royal Academy in 1782, the work mixed eroticism and supernatural terror.

Thomas Burke's 1783 engraving helped the composition spread into copies and political caricatures.

Thomas Burke's engraving carried the composition far beyond the exhibition. Political caricaturists soon replaced the sleeper with a public figure and the incubus with a current burden. Private erotic terror became a reusable diagram of pressure, guilt, and power, recognizable without Fuseli's name.

Freud's Nightmare

The image outlived its century

A reproduction hung in Sigmund Freud's Vienna apartment in the 1920s.

With no safe literary plot, the painting still feels recognizable yet impossible to explain completely.

A reproduction hung in Sigmund Freud's Vienna apartment in the 1920s, as the museum confirms. Calling the picture a prophecy of psychoanalysis would be too neat, yet Freud changed its afterlife. Modern viewers hunt repressed desire and trauma where the audience of 1782 encountered a startling Gothic spectacle.

Official sources