This erotic dream turned nightmare may have inspired ‘Frankenstein'

Washington Post

17-07-2025

Great Works, In Focus
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#196 This erotic dream turned nightmare may have inspired 'Frankenstein'
Henry Fuseli scandalized London, but his painting of a demonic visitor quickly became popular across art and culture.
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Column by Sebastian Smee
July 17, 2025 at 2:00 p.m. EDT
4 minutes ago
3 min
Chest pressure. You feel it at night, never quite knowing if its source is physical, psychological or some fiendish amalgam of both. You try to breathe deeply, but there's a heavy, invisible presence constricting your torso. You're like a cyclist pushing, pushing for the crest of the hill and a rush of descent that never comes. Emotion rises in your throat. Feelings of hopelessness. Your body is stretched, tensed, on the rack …
Pardon the flight of fancy. But I'm trying to think through — or feel through — this shamelessly gratuitous painting by Henry Fuseli. 'The Nightmare' hangs in the Detroit Institute of Arts, as shocking and inexplicable as when Fuseli (1741-1825), a Swiss-born artist living in England, first presented it publicly at the Royal Academy in 1782.
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In his public lectures, Fuseli was a proponent of neoclassicism — of order and tradition, of everything being accorded its correct proportions. But he was really a hidden romanticist, a close friend of William Blake, eager to indulge inner visions, erotic fancies and his personal penchant for excess and extremity.
As a young man, he'd been forced by his father — a portrait painter — to train as a Protestant minister. But he found himself in hot water after exposing a corrupt local magistrate in an ill-tempered pamphlet and had to leave Zurich. In 1765, he settled in London, where he was befriended by the painter Joshua Reynolds, who encouraged Fuseli to commit himself to painting and to train in Rome, where he lived for the next eight years.
High on Michelangelo and the late-16th-century mannerists, Fuseli became an influential figure among the expatriate artists who flocked to Rome. Returning to Switzerland, he became besotted with the niece of his friend, Johann Kaspar Lavater. But his marriage proposal was rejected by her father, so Fuseli repaired to London and painted 'The Nightmare.'
Often interpreted as a reference to his unconsummated love affair, it shows a viciously leering incubus squatting on the torso of a young woman in a diaphanous white dress. She is suggestively stretched out on a bed, her tossed-back head and vulnerable neck dangling over the side. A spectral, white-eyed horse — thought to have been painted in later — peers in on the scene, almost comically, through dark red curtains.
The painting, though scandalous (William Hazlitt called it 'a nightmare on the breast of British art'), quickly became popular. It is said to have inspired aspects of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' and countless imitators and parodists since.
The picture cries out for interpretation (it's in no way surprising to learn that Sigmund Freud hung an engraving of 'The Nightmare' on the walls of his Vienna apartment), and yet it stubbornly resists attempts to say anything definitive about it.
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The painting's eroticism is blatant. Almost everything in it has a fetishistic quality: the hanging tassel; the pointed toe; the tumbling hair; the pink-and-gold fabric spilling out from under her hips; her hanging hand, its limp fingers curled where they softly meet the floor.
But it's a disturbed eroticism, with a thwarted, sinister character. The woman is all taut, sinuous curves and linear flow; you feel she might have been poured into the picture from the left. But that leering incubus is going nowhere, and his chilling stare, aimed directly at us, blocks the dream's unfolding, crushing eros into a malign murkiness, and leaving us gasping for air.