Fuseli's Nightmare: the Night Demon that Conquered London
Henry Fuseli's 1781 painting, now in Detroit: the mare of folklore, the horse between the curtains and the fortune of a great Romantic icon.
When the Royal Academy in London exhibited Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare in 1782, the public was struck and divided. On a bed a young woman lies sprawled, her arms hanging towards the floor; on her chest squats a dark demon, and between the curtains appears the head of a mare with white eyes. The painting, dated 1781, is now in the Detroit Institute of Arts and has become an icon of the Romantic taste for the irrational.
A Swiss painter in London
Fuseli, born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zurich in 1741, first studied theology and became a Protestant minister. Forced to leave the city after denouncing a corrupt magistrate together with his friend Johann Kaspar Lavater, he moved to England, where he called himself Henry Fuseli. Encouraged by the painter Joshua Reynolds to devote himself to art, he spent eight years in Rome, studying Michelangelo and ancient sculpture.
Back in London, he became a leading figure in artistic culture: he was elected an Academician, taught painting at the Royal Academy and served as its Keeper until his death in 1825. A great reader of Shakespeare, Milton and Dante, he always preferred literary and visionary subjects, far from the portraiture and landscape that dominated the English market of his time.
The demon on the chest
The subject of The Nightmare is rooted in popular beliefs found throughout Europe. In Germanic and English folklore the «mare» was a spirit that sat at night on the chests of sleepers, causing a sense of oppression and suffocation. From this figure comes the English word nightmare, which has nothing to do with the female horse, but Fuseli exploited the coincidence as a visual pun by placing the animal in the scene.
Medieval theology had spoken of incubi and succubi, demons able to lie with sleepers, while ancient medicine described the same phenomenon as a sleep disorder. Fuseli does not choose between these explanations: he represents the dream and its content in the same space, as if the viewer saw at once the sleeper and what torments her. This ambiguity between physiology and the supernatural is one of the reasons for its power.
The fortune of an image
Success was immediate. As early as 1783 the engraver Thomas Burke made a print of it that circulated widely, and Fuseli himself produced several other versions of the subject, including one kept in Goethe's house in Frankfurt. The painting was soon taken up by political caricaturists, who replaced the sleeper with kings and ministers tormented by their opponents.
Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, devoted some lines of his poem The Botanic Garden to the image, and Gothic novelists found in it a repertoire of atmospheres. Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of the future author of Frankenstein, was bound to Fuseli by an intense friendship. In the twentieth century psychoanalysts and Surrealists recognised in it an early representation of the unconscious and its phantoms.
The Nightmare marks the moment when European painting began to explore not only the visible world but also what happens in the mind during sleep. Without abandoning the classical language learnt in Rome, Fuseli opened the way to a long Romantic and Symbolist tradition, showing that ancient beliefs about night demons could become material for a new art of the dream.