Samuel Westermayer Professor William Adams Intro to Humanities C100 6 February 2017 The Nightmare My initial thoughts and feelings towards this piece of art was that of concern and a feeling of uncomfortable fear. There is a lot of unexplained activity going on in this painting and I feel there must be a lot of symbolism to the characters involved here. The woman cloaked in all white who looks like she is in pain, the demonic entity who is sitting upon her chest, and the dark horse peeking into the seen with flared nostrils and a menacing look all seem to be key to the dark theme being portrayed in this painting. The thing about this painting that interests me the most is the imp like creature sitting across the woman’s chest, …show more content…
He was born in 1741 and passed away in 1825. During his life as a painter, he enjoyed exploring the darker and more twisted side of life. Fuseli is most admired for his subjectivism, intricate symbolism and bold composition (visual-arts-corks.com). The Nightmare was created in 1779 and was an instant hit. It became Fuseli’s most successful painting and became a landmark in the development of Romanticism. The Nightmare owes its everlasting fame to two significant reasons: It was one of the first painting to successfully portray an intangible idea, rather than an event, a person, or a story. Second, the exact intentions of the artist remain obscure (visual-arts-corks.com). The monster that is sitting on the woman’s chest is what is called an incubus, which is a male demonic entity who, per mythological traditions, lies upon women to engage them in sexual activity and lead them into …show more content…
The only exception to this color scheme is the woman, who is cloaked in more heavenly whites and gold tones. Some believe the painting to be a piece of romantic retaliation, focusing on the girl laying on the bed who may have been an object of the artist’s unreturned attention. While traveling through Europe, Fuseli met and fell madly in love with Anna Landholdt. Anna’s father refused Fuseli’s marriage proposal and quickly pledged her to another. Many theorists believe Anna is the woman in this painting and the demonic figure sitting atop her chest is Fuseli’s image of himself (Independent.co.uk). The horse in the background is seen pushing its head through the curtain, and it could be that this ghostly horse was the imp’s means of traveling through the night. No one is quite certain of the symbolic meaning of the horse, this was just the most accurate
The painting that captivated my eyes was “La Buena Ventura”. As I was walking through the hallway my eyes were drawn to this beautiful young woman wearing a bluish greenish dress and what seems to be pink hearts. She is sitting down with a sad look on her face staring at her cards. I tried distinguishing the type of cards and to me they look a little like tarot cards. So I interpreted this as her not happy with what her fortune has in store for her. Maybe she is waiting for her love or she might have found out that tragedy is going to strike her way. I noticed the guitar at the far left corner so she could be a musician who is having a hard time making money. This oil painting is done so beautifully, the artist used a lot of texture and a mixture of dark colors to bring out the shadows and accentuate
Wayne, transforms this painting into a three dimensional abstract piece of art. The focal point of the painting are the figures that look like letters and numbers that are in the front of the piece of art. This is where your eyes expend more time, also sometimes forgiving the background. The way the artist is trying to present this piece is showing happiness, excitement, and dreams. Happiness because he transmits with the bright colours. After probably 15 minutes on front of the painting I can feel that the artist tries to show his happiness, but in serene calm. The excitement that he presents with the letters, numbers and figures is a signal that he feels anxious about what the future is going to bring. Also in the way that the colors in the background are present he is showing that no matter how dark our day can be always will be light to
At first glance, the painting is very dark and shadowy convening the message of a sinful world. The chiaroscuro represents that we do not live in a perfect world, there is always evil lingering in the shadows. The main light source in the painting
The colors used in the painting are dark and some parts bright illustrating a focal point being the skull in the center as well as the quill, both surrounded by darker colors in comparison.
Chapter 6. 1717: in Delfzijl, Aunt Rika, wife of a slave trader, offers the painting as a bribe to her nephew Adriaan to hide the evidence of his bastard child and keep her name respectable.
The mixed reaction I have towards the painting is because, first off, I still wouldn’t know what is really behind it or what it’s trying to tell us without looking at it from a distance. When I looked at it from a computer desktop I could see a shoe, a mountai...
The composition of this painting forces the eye to the woman, and specifically to her face. Although the white wedding dress is large and takes up most of the woman’s figure, the white contrasts with her face and dark hair, forcing the viewer to look more closely into the woman’s face. She smokes a cigarette and rests her chin on her hands. She does not appear to be a very young woman and her eyes are cast down and seem sad. In general, her face appears to show a sense of disillusionment with life and specifically with her own life. Although this is apparently her wedding day, she does not seem to be happy.
For many, saying or hearing the word romanticism evokes numerous stereotypical and prejudged definitions and emotions. The biggest reason this probably happens is because of how closely romanticism sounds like romance. The similarity of the sounds and spelling of the two words can lead to some thinking that the two words mean the same thing or are closely related. Although romanticism and romance do share some similarities in their spelling and pronunciation they couldn’t be more different. In the Merriam Webster Dictionary romance is defined as, “a love story”. The Romantic Period was not necessarily a time of true romance and love stories, although love was written about, but was instead a time of extreme emotion expressed in many different ways. One of the many ways emotion was expressed was through the use of supernatural and gothic literature and a lot of it contained horrific subject matter for the time it was written, making it anything but romantic. Expressions of thought and emotion were shown through horror and the supernatural just as much as emotion was expressed through love and romance. Many of the authors during the Romantic period submitted works, “dealing with the supernatural, the weird, and the horrible” (Britannica Online Encyclopedia). In many ways, gothic tales of horror and suspense defined the Romantic period just as much as any other type of literature at the time.
images in this painting, all of which have the power to symbolize to us, the viewer, of the painter’s
In the painting the skin tones of the people who are dead is drastically lighter than those of the people who are alive. It also uses color to show the darkness of the clouds which means that there was a storm and it uses lighter colors for the sky which means that the storm has passed. The painting uses color to draw your eye to the people waving their colorful clothes around. This in return draws your eye to the spec of color on the horizon which represents a ship. On the other hand, it also draws your eye to the man who is holding a little boy toward the back of the ship with the color of what appears to be a scarf on his head. In all this shows that color is used to help give the feeling of chaos and disaster in the
His father was a devout Catholic and denounced his son’s works. This painting is displayed as rising out of their troubled relationship together but it resists precise analysis. His revolt against his father is highlighted through, “But, dear Father, for what reason are you so opposed to dreams…? It would seem to me that dreams are a bastion against the regularity and familiarity of life and interrupt the perpetual earnestness of adults with a joyous children’s game.”
For all its traditional sources in images of the sleeping Venus, the witch, and lovesickness, Fuseli’s Nightmare moved into a decidedly late-eighteenth century world of darkness and irrationality that would soon be hallmarks of much Romanticism. Fuseli’s exploration of Nightmares would become impactful in the art world, creating subject matter that would be used by many artist following him. A similar interest in irrationality informed the most widely reproduced painting of the late eighteenth century, Henry Fuseli's Nightmare of 1781. Fuseli's work explored a world of sexual nightmare and rape imaged in the erotic possession of a beautiful woman by a monstrous demon.
The painting depicts two figures, the one of a woman and of a man. The dominating central figure is the one of the woman. We see her profile as she looks to the left. Her hands are crossed in a graceful manner. She has blonde hair and her figure is lit by what seems to be natur...
...rit of the dead, watches over her. Gauguin, in this painting, created a supernatural and fearful aura in this painting. Gauguin experimented with color to arouse deep emotion. Besides the upsetting color, the general composition of the painting is disturbing. The old woman in the background that is watching the girl is eerie.
A couple of times throughout my life I heard that art will speak to you even though it doesn’t talk. Not having a real knowledgeable understanding of art or being a big appreciator of it, Berthold Woltze’s ‘The Irritating Gentleman’ (1874) is an oil painting that depicts realism that really draws me into everything in the painting because of the attention to detail he put into it. This particular work is the first time that anything in the art category has made me feel a special way about it and it truly does speak to me.