Mystery Stalks a Haunting Dream
Henry Fuseli’s ‘The Nightmare’ bewitches the observer with its unnerving ambiguity.
‘The Nightmare’ (1782), by Henry Fuseli
When the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” struggles to describe a style of painting, he resorts to a comparison and cites the “concrete reveries of Fuseli.” This is a reference to Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), and it begs a question: How does anybody describe “The Nightmare,” the artist’s best-known work?
Sigmund Freud didn’t even try. He apparently kept a reproduction of “The Nightmare” in his study in Vienna, yet he never wrote about it. Mary Shelley knew the painting, and a menacing line in her 1818 novel, “Frankenstein,” may owe something to Fuseli’s strange vision: “I shall be with you on your wedding-night.” Horace Walpole, author of “The Castle of Otranto,” which is widely regarded as the first Gothic novel, saw Fuseli’s painting at its debut in 1782. He had one word for it, which he scribbled in his catalog: “shocking.”
Born in Switzerland, Fuseli chose to pursue painting only as an adult. In Rome, he would lie on his back and gaze at the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling to study Michelangelo, whose influence may be seen in the bulky bodies that populate Fuseli’s paintings and illustrations. Although he lacked technical training, Fuseli went on to establish himself as a mainstream figure in London’s art world and won election to the Royal Academy. The subjects of his paintings tend to draw from familiar literary and mythological sources. The stories of Shakespeare were a favorite inspiration as he rendered the ghost from “Hamlet,” the witches from “Macbeth,” and Falstaff from “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
“The Nightmare” is different. It has no obvious source, nor does it have a clear meaning. Much of its enduring appeal comes from its unnerving ambiguity. The painting’s most basic question is impossible to answer: Whose nightmare is it? It could belong to the woman as she dreams of the terror on her torso. Or it could be our own, as we watch an incubus assault a defenseless victim.
Other aspects add to the mystery. The full-figured woman who reclines in her form-fitting dress is both provocative in pose and innocent in white. Bottles on the table beside her may contain sleeping drugs, perhaps of the sort that conjure hallucinations of unwelcome visitants. The crouching imp is at once a pointy-eared demon with a cruel gaze and a pudgy dwarf who looks like he could sit on a bookshelf as a plush doll.
The horse is an odd element. It thrusts its oblong head through a red curtain in a manner that would have intrigued Freud. The beast is blind, too. Eyes are a striking feature in many of Fuseli’s paintings, but this animal has no pupils in its milky orbs. Its presence evokes folklore about monsters and midnight rides. It also suggests a pun. The words “mare” and “nightmare” share no connection in etymology. Here, however, they combine in a bizarre and perhaps comic union.
Commentators often interpret “The Nightmare” as a portrayal of illicit desire or subconscious fear. For this reason, art historians have tended to see it as both an early expression of Romanticism and a forerunner of 20th-century Surrealism.
The secret to Fuseli’s purpose, and possibly the picture’s meaning, may lie literally beneath its surface. After the Detroit Institute of Arts acquired the work in 1955, a conservator removed a piece of canvas covering the back of the painting, revealing a hidden portrait of an attractive young woman. Nobody knows her name, but one theory holds that she is Anna Landolt, the niece of a friend of Fuseli’s.
On a visit to Switzerland in 1779, Fuseli had become infatuated with her. “She is mine, and I am hers. And have her I will,” he wrote in a letter. “What God or Nature hath joined, let no man—let no business-man sunder.” This last statement pulls from the Gospel of Matthew but probably refers to the merchant who married Landolt, who seems not to have felt about Fuseli the way the painter felt about her.
The woman on the bed in “The Nightmare” looks like the one who had been concealed, from the big hair to the plunging neckline. The face of the fiend who squats on her, some observers have noted, bears at least a passing resemblance to the artist. “The Nightmare” could depict the pain of an unrequited love or, more disturbingly, a fantasy of revenge.
“One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams,” Fuseli wrote in a book of aphorisms. As for the undiscovered country of “The Nightmare” and its inscrutable meaning, the artist was like one of his painting’s speechless onlookers: He never said.