Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare

The Nightmare, painted by Henry Fuseli, became an icon of Romanticism and a defining image of Gothic horror (Lebailly, 2016). Some of my favorite writers, for example, Mary Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe, were inspired by Fuseli’s dark painting which led me to choose his work of art for my humanities paper. As I scanned the list you had given us to choose from, Henry’s name lit up with familiarity. In high school, I did extensive research after reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and learned about Henry Fuseli. I began studying his art and I fell in love. I chose Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare because of its mixture of horror, sexuality, and morbidity.

Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Henry Fuseli was the second out of eighteen children. When Fuseli was a young boy, he developed a keen curiosity for art and began making sketches of pieces from his father’s art gallery. His father disapproved; he had a set path for him to study theology and become a minister. Fuseli decided that he would go get his education and dedicate all his time to the church in order to please his father. In the midst of following his father’s dreams, he met Sir Joshua Reynolds, who encouraged him to pursue a professional

While traveling through Europe, Fuseli met and fell in love with a woman whose father forbade the marriage (“The Nightmare—Henry Fuseli”). However the artist never reveals his precise intentions of the work. We do know that Fuseli uses ‘sleep’ and ‘dreams’ as regular themes in his paintings and that his choice and style of imagery were influenced by the art of classical antiquity, the Italian Renaissance, and the German Renaissance. Countless interpretations have been made about each component of The Nightmare (The Nightmare—Henry Fuseli”). From the meaning of the woman’s helpless pose to the meaning of the placement of the incubus, many factors of this piece are still debated upon to this