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Making Sense of Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare Painting
The psychological darkness inside the mind
When viewers first saw this chilling painting, The Nightmare, they reacted with alarmed amazement. It depicts a woman in deep sleep being visited by demons. The image distilled centuries-old ideas about the vulnerability we succumb to when we sleep — and also proposed a counterbalance to the emerging view of the time, that human beings were rational creatures superior to superstition and myth.
Henry Fuseli was a Swiss artist who spent much of his life working in 18th century Britain. His drawings and paintings illustrated scenes from literary sources like Shakespeare and Milton’s Paradise Lost, and at times deviated into supernatural themes to explore folkloric tales of witches and devils.
The Nightmare proved to be one of Fuseli’s most popular and enduring images. This was the era of the Enlightenment, the so-called “Age of Reason”, a time when the philosopher Immanuel Kant advocated mankind’s intellectual capacities to determine what to believe and how to act. Yet Fuseli’s painting addressed the abiding sense that phantoms and spectres were still part of everyday experience. It also prefigured late 19th century theories of psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud regarding the potency of dreams and the workings of the unconscious.
