Date: 29-10-2000
Owning Institution: Tate Britain
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 18th Century        

As Halloween looms and things go bump in the night, this week’s appropriately ghoulish picture is The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli. First exhibited in London in 1782, it seems to have fascinated and disturbed its intended audience in roughly equal measure. William Hazlitt had it in mind when he half-jokingly stigmatised the Swiss-born émigré Fuseli as “a nightmare on the breast of British art”. But despite a mixed critical reception the picture was a great popular success and it made Fuseli’s name. For all the self-confessed imperfections of his technique (“I have courted colour,” he once wrote, “as a lover who courts a disdainful mistress”) and notwithstanding the vivid lubricity of his imagination, he rose to the position of Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, becoming a veritable pillar of the establishment.

Fuseli was a man of contradictions. He wrote and lectured extensively on classical art. He corresponded with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, impressed William Blake and enchanted Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, who fell unrequitedly in love with him. In many ways he exemplified the rationalist and freethinking spirit of his times. Yet this stern and solemn upholder of the Neoclassical creed, this typical child of the Enlightenment, was also powerfully attracted to the darker sides of life.

The conflicting impulses driving the artist’s imagination are visibly at work in The Nightmare. The picture is full of borrowings from classic art. The incubus squatting on the chest of the diaphanously clad maiden resembles Roman carvings of Bacchus’s drunken companion, Silenus. The goggle-eyed nag harks back to the classical Horse Tamers on Monte Cavallo in Rome. The pose of the sleeping girl was borrowed from that of a Sleeping Psyche painted by Giulio Romano, while her heavy build and unusually muscly thighs reflect the influence of the monumental female sibyls painted by Michelangelo, whose masterpiece Fuseli spent his formative years literally looking up to. In the 1770s, when he was a student living in the Rome, the artist spent days on end lying on his back admiring the Sistine Chapel ceiling (nowadays finger-clicking attendants put a stop to such improprieties), remarking that “such a position is necessary for a body fatigued like mine with the pleasant gratifications of a luxurious city.”

For all its allusions to the venerable past, The Nightmare is hardly a textbook example of Neoclassical art. The leering demon and his pantomime-horse accomplice, suspended in a midnight murk, are grotesque and disconcerting monsters. Their swooning victim, a boneless creature, pallid as a worm, seems almost as monstrous herself. There is nothing much like the picture in the art of Fuseli’s contemporaries, although there are equivalents to it in the literature of the time, particularly in the more lurid imaginings of the Gothic novelists.

The author and gossip Allan Cunningham circulated the story that Fuseli “supped on raw pork chops that he might dream his picture of the nightmare”. That may or may not be true, but he certainly drew on the common stock of folklore. He would have been familiar with the old-wives’-tale that susceptible women are visited in their sleep by the devil, have intercourse with him, and remember it in the form of nightmares. This helps to explain Fuseli’s sexual innuendo, his suggestion that the nightmare is an erotic experience as well as a supernatural one. The expression on the dreamer’s flushed face is, to say the least, ambiguous.

The painter’s contemporary Samuel Johnson gave a definition of “nightmare” in his Dictionary: “from night and mara, a spirit that, in the northern mythology, was said to torment or suffocate sleepers. A morbid oppression in the night, resembling the pressure of weight upon the breast.” This complicates the identity of Fuseli’s malign incubus, making him the mara of “nightmare” as well as a manifestation of the devil (the mara is also associated with the legendary vampire). The inclusion of a horse in the scene is unexplained but may simply be a play on words. The celebrity of the painting has fostered the common misconception that there is an etymological link between the words “mare” and “nightmare”, when there is none.

In Fuseli’s time the advance of rational attitudes had put paid to many superstitions about dreams and nightmares. John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, had ridiculed both the folk belief that nightmares were caused by evil spirits and the related Christian idea that they were the work of the devil. For him, dreams of all kinds merely provided evidence of the insignificant and disordered mode of thinking that occupies the mind in sleep, a jumble of “oddly put together” ideas and fragments of memory. Other authors were less dismissive if equally unsuperstitious, the philosopher Immanuel Kant arguing that nightmares were the mind’s way of waking people up when they had gone to sleep in positions that blocked the circulation. The idea that dreams might have an explicable, benign role in life was to find its most influential expression in the work of Sigmund Freud, for whom dreaming was an essential self-regulatory mechanism of the psyche. Freud, incidentally, kept a reproduction of The Nightmare in his apartment in Vienna in the 1920s.

Close examination of the picture has revealed what might be construed as a bit of a Freudian slip. On the back of the canvas there is an abandoned portrait of a young lady. She has been identified as Anna Landolt, with whom Fuseli fell passionately in love, but who jilted him not long before he began The Nightmare. The art historian H.W.Janson, who published this discovery, believes that the painting is an act of sublimated sexual revenge, “with the demon taking the place of the artist himself.” This is not entirely farfetched. Fuseli’s private drawings include several extremely graphic images of sado-masochistic fantasies. He did, in real life, look a little like his incubus, being distinctly short and squat.

Subconscious wish-fulfilment may have played a part but it would be wrong to suggest that Fuseli was out of control, gripped by a mere folie d’amour, when he painted The Nightmare. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was playing cleverly on folk belief, channelling ancient superstitions and religious fears into what he hoped people would accept as a new form of entertainment. The horror genre has never really looked back.