The Nightmare
The Nightmare | |
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Detroit, Michigan |
The Nightmare is a 1781 oil painting by Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. It shows a woman in deep sleep with her arms thrown below her, and with a demonic and ape-like incubus crouched on her chest. The painting's dreamlike and haunting erotic evocation of infatuation and obsession was a huge popular success.
After its first exhibition, at the 1782
Interpretations vary. The canvas seems to portray simultaneously a dreaming woman and the content of her nightmare. The incubus and horse's head refer to contemporary belief and folklore about
Description
The Nightmare simultaneously offers both the image of a dream—by indicating the effect of the nightmare on the woman—and a dream image—in symbolically portraying the sleeping vision.
For contemporary viewers, the relationship of the incubus and the horse (
Sleep and dreams were common subjects for the
Fuseli's knowledge of art history was broad, allowing critics to propose sources for the painting's elements in antique, classical, and Renaissance art. According to art critic Nicholas Powell, the woman's pose may derive from the Vatican Ariadne, and the style of the incubus from figures at Selinunte, an archaeological site in Sicily.[4] A source for the woman in Giulio Romano's The Dream of Hecuba[b] at the Palazzo del Te has also been proposed.[7] Powell links the horse to a woodcut by the German Renaissance artist Hans Baldung or to the marble Horse Tamers on Quirinal Hill, Rome.[3][7] Fuseli may have added the horse as an afterthought, since a preliminary chalk sketch did not include it. Its presence in the painting has been viewed as a visual pun on the word "nightmare" and a self-conscious reference to folklore—the horse destabilises the painting's conceit and contributes to its Gothic tone.[2]
Exhibition
The painting is housed at the
It remained well-known decades later, and Fuseli painted other versions on the same theme. Fuseli sold the original for twenty
So on his Nightmare through the evening fog
Flits the squab Fiend o'er fen, and lake, and bog;
Seeks some love-wilder'd maid with sleep oppress'd,
Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.
Darwin included these lines and expanded upon them in his long poem
—Such as of late amid the murky sky
Was mark'd by Fuseli's poetic eye;
Whose daring tints, with Shakspeare's happiest grace,
Gave to the airy phantom form and place.—
Back o'er her pillow sinks her blushing head,
Her snow-white limbs hang helpless from the bed;
Her interrupted heart-pulse swims in death.
O'er her fair limbs convulsive tremors fleet,
Start in her hands, and struggle in her feet;
In vain to scream with quivering lips she tries,
And strains in palsy'd lids her tremulous eyes;
In vain she wills to run, fly, swim, walk, creep;
The Will presides not in the bower of Sleep.
—On her fair bosom sits the Demon-Ape
Erect, and balances his bloated shape;
Rolls in their marble orbs his Gorgon-eyes,
And drinks with leathern ears her tender cries.[10]
Interpretation
Contemporary critics often found the work scandalous due to its sexual themes. [citation needed] A few years earlier Fuseli had fallen for a woman named Anna Landholdt in Zürich, while travelling from Rome to London. Landholdt was the niece of his friend, the Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater. Fuseli wrote of his fantasies to Lavater in 1779; "Last night I had her in bed with me—tossed my bedclothes hugger-mugger—wound my hot and tight-clasped hands about her—fused her body and soul together with my own—poured into her my spirit, breath and strength. Anyone who touches her now commits adultery and incest! She is mine, and I am hers. And have her I will.…"[11]
Fuseli's marriage proposal met with disapproval from Landholdt's father, and in any case seems to have been unrequited—she married a family friend soon after. The Nightmare, then, can be seen as a personal portrayal of the erotic aspects of love lost. Art historian H. W. Janson suggests that the sleeping woman represents Landholdt and that the demon is Fuseli himself. Bolstering this claim is an unfinished portrait of a girl on the back of the painting's canvas, which may portray Landholdt. Anthropologist Charles Stewart characterises the sleeping woman as "voluptuous,"[5] and one scholar of the Gothic describes her as lying in a "sexually receptive position."[12] In Woman as Sex Object (1972), Marcia Allentuck similarly argues that the painting's intent is to show female orgasm. This is supported by Fuseli's sexually overt and even pornographic private drawings (e.g., Symplegma of Man with Two Women, 1770–78).[4] Fuseli's painting has been considered representative of sublimated sexual instincts.[3] Related interpretations of the painting view the incubus as a dream symbol of male libido, with the sexual act represented by the horse's intrusion through the curtain.[13] Fuseli himself provided no commentary on his painting.
Both the English word nightmare[14] and its German equivalent, Albtraum (literally 'elf dream'), evoke the image of a malevolent being that causes bad dreams by sitting on the chest of the sleeper.[15]
The Royal Academy exhibition brought Fuseli and his painting enduring fame. The exhibition included Shakespeare-themed works by Fuseli, which won him a commission to produce eight paintings for publisher
While some observers have viewed the parodies as mocking Fuseli, it is more likely that The Nightmare was simply a vehicle for ridicule of the caricatured subject.
Fuseli painted other versions of The Nightmare following the success of the first; at least three survive. The other important canvas was painted between 1790 and 1791 and is held at the
Legacy
Influence on literature
The Nightmare likely influenced
Edgar Allan Poe may have evoked The Nightmare in his short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839). His narrator compares a painting hanging in Usher's house to a Fuseli work, and reveals that an "irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm".[21] Poe and Fuseli shared an interest in the subconscious; Fuseli is often quoted as saying, "One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams".[21]
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
Fuseli's Nightmare reverberated with twentieth-century psychological theorists. In 1926, American writer
Tate Britain held an exhibition titled Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination between 15 February and 1 May 2006, with the Nightmare as the central exhibit. The catalogue indicated the painting's influence on films such as the original Frankenstein (1931) and The Marquise of O (1976). Among modern artists, Balthus incorporated elements of The Nightmare in his work (e.g., The Room (1952–54).[d][23]
The 2015 documentary The Nightmare may be a reference to the painting as it documents sleep paralysis sufferers (who often hallucinate creatures sitting on their chest).
Famous drag queen Katya Zamolodchikova released an EP titled Vampire Fitness in November 2020. The EP cover art is a direct reference to The Nightmare, with Katya portraying both the woman and the demon over her body. She even included a horse statue in one corner of the room. It serves as a modern reinterpretation of the painting, with the woman appearing completely nude, except for a pair of sunglasses.
In February 2021, Amaia Salazar, a postdoctoral researcher and visual artist, conducts intense research on the pictorial representation of sleep paralysis throughout the history of art (18th - 21st century), analysing and discovering similar prototypes and archetypes of artistic representation, inspired by Fuseli's artwork.
In January 2023
Notes
^ b: Web image of Giulio Romano's The Dream of Hecuba.
^ c: Web image of Cruikshank's satirical portrait Napoleon Dreaming in His Cell at the Military College (1814), after The Nightmare.
^ d: Web image of Balthus's The Room (1952–54).
References
- ^ The etymology of the word "nightmare", however, does not relate to horses. Rather, the word is derived from mara, a Scandinavian mythological term referring to a spirit sent to torment or suffocate sleepers.
- ^ ISBN 0-7486-1195-9.
- ^ a b c Palumbo, Donald (1986). Eros in the Mind's Eye: Sexuality and the Fantastic in Art and Film. Greenwood Press. pp. 40–42.
- ^ ISBN 1-55862-001-X.
- ^ .
- ^ Ferruccio Busoni. "JOHANN HEINRICH FÜSSLI" (in Italian).
- ^ a b Chappell, Miles L. (June 1986). "Fuseli and the 'Judicious Adoption' of the Antique in the 'Nightmare'". The Burlington Magazine. 128 (999): 420–422.
- ^ a b Knowles, John (1831). The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Vol. 1. H. Colburn and R. Bentley. pp. 64–65. Retrieved 21 October 2007.
- ^ Moffitt, John F. (2002). "A Pictorial Counterpart to 'Gothick' Literature: Fuseli's The Nightmare". Mosaic. 35 (1). University of Manitoba.
- ^ Darwin, Erasmus (1825). The Botanic Garden: A Poem in Two Parts…. Jones & Company. p. 165. Retrieved 21 October 2007.
- ^ JSTOR 1315115.
- ISBN 0-86547-544-X.
- ^ ISBN 0-13-196269-8.
- ISBN 978-0-19-538707-0. Retrieved 29 March 2012.
- ^ Bjorvand and Lindeman (2007), pp. 719–720.
- ^ Chard, Leslie. "Joseph Johnson: Father of the Book Trade". Bulletin of the New York Public Library 78 (1975): 63.
- ^ ISBN 1-57958-423-3.
- LCCN 72077546.
- ^ Abildgaard's painting was owned for a time by the poet, dramatist and painter Holger Drachmann and hung in his house in Skagen
- ^ "Room 3—Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli): tales told anew". The Frankfurt Goethe-Museum. Archived from the original on 15 July 2007. Retrieved 5 October 2007.
- ^ .
- ISBN 0-275-97243-7.
- ^ Perl, Jed (July–August 2006). "anaTroubled classicism: The hyper personality of Henry Fuseli's work". Modern Painters: 80–85.
- ^ "Martin Rowson on Rishi Sunak's sleaze nightmares - cartoon". Retrieved 23 January 2023.
Further reading
- Recent exhibit and publication: Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Imagination. 15 February–1 May 2006. ISBN 1-85437-582-2
- Jones, E. On the Nightmare. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1931.
External links