The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli: a close reading

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Some paintings are famous for their beauty. The Nightmare is famous because it gets under your skin. When Henry Fuseli showed it in London in 1782, people crowded to see it, and prints of it sold for years. More than two centuries later it still turns up wherever people talk about dreams, demons and the dark side of sleep. Here I read it slowly, from what is on the canvas to what it might mean, with the folklore and the esoteric side clearly labelled.

At a glance

The painting is about a meter tall and more than a meter wide. In a room it would read as a large, close scene, as if the bed were just in front of you.

First look: what you see

A young woman lies on her back across a bed, in a long white gown. Her head, one arm and her hair hang down over the edge, almost touching the floor. Her body is twisted so that we see her throat and face upside down. She is asleep, or something deeper than asleep.

On her chest crouches a small, heavy creature with pointed ears and a broad, ugly face. It is not attacking her. It just sits, and turns its head to look out of the picture, straight at us.

Behind it, a dark red curtain parts, and a horse’s head pushes through. The horse has no pupils. Its eyes are pale blanks, and its nostrils flare. On a small table near the bed stand a few small objects, including a glass bottle, a small jar and what may be a small book or box. The room is dark. The only strong light falls on the woman.

That is all. No story is told, no one wakes, nothing happens. Fuseli paints a single frozen moment.

Composition, color and light

The composition rests on one long, bright shape: the white figure lying across the canvas from left to right. Because she is upside down and bent backward over the bed, the shape is not restful. It looks like a curve under strain, a body pressed down.

Above that bright curve sit two dark shapes, the crouching demon and the horse’s head. They are close to each other in the upper center and right, and they make a triangle with the woman’s face. Your eye moves from her pale face to the demon, from the demon to the horse, and back down.

Color is limited and theatrical. Whites and creams for the woman and the bedding, deep reds and golds for the curtain and cushions, browns and blacks for everything else. Light comes from the left and seems to fall only on her, like a stage spotlight. The dark spaces swallow the edges of the room, so you cannot tell how big it is or where the walls are.

Fuseli loved the theater, and you can feel it. The bed is like a stage, the curtain is a theater curtain, and the horse enters as if from the wings.

Symbols and story

The incubus. The creature on her chest is an incubus, a demon of the night. In medieval and early modern belief, incubi were spirits that visited sleepers, pressed on their chests and in some stories seduced them. Fuseli does not show any seduction. He shows the weight: a body pinned by something sitting on it.

The horse and the word. In English, the “mare” of nightmare does not come from the word for a female horse. It comes from an older word, mare, meaning a goblin or spirit that lies on sleepers and causes bad dreams. Related words exist in other northern languages. Fuseli seems to play on the double meaning by putting both the goblin and a ghostly horse into the same picture. The pun works visually even though the words are different.

The sleeper. The woman’s pose, with her head and arm thrown back over the edge, was a sign of extreme helplessness. She is not in control of her body. Many viewers in 1782 also read the painting as erotic, because of her pose and the long tradition of the incubus as a sexual demon. Fuseli let that tension stand without spelling it out.

The objects. The small things on the table may hint at a private bedroom, at reading late, or at medicine taken before sleep. Their meaning is not certain. I would mark any reading of them as interpretation.

Context: the artist and the period

Fuseli was born in Zurich in 1741 as Johann Heinrich Füssli. He trained for the church, then left Switzerland for London in 1764. Encouraged to become a painter, he spent most of the 1770s in Rome, studying Michelangelo, and returned to London in 1779. The Nightmare was one of the first paintings that made his name.

He showed it at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1782. It became a sensation. A mezzotint engraving after it, made by Thomas Burke and published in 1783, spread the image across Britain and Europe, and cartoonists began to borrow the composition for political satire. In 1789 the poet and physician Erasmus Darwin printed verses on the painting in The Loves of the Plants, describing the night spirit sitting on the sleeper. Fuseli later became Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy and painted other versions of the same subject.

The painting belongs to a moment when artists and writers were turning away from calm reason toward feeling, dread and the irrational. Writers spoke of “the sublime,” the pleasure of being thrilled or frightened by something vast or dark. Gothic novels were becoming popular in the same decades. The Nightmare fits that mood perfectly: it does not explain fear, it lets you feel it.

The esoteric angle

Historical The idea behind the painting is old folk belief. In many parts of Europe people believed that a night spirit, hag or demon could sit on a sleeper’s chest, causing a crushing weight, an inability to move and terrible dreams. In English this was called being “hag-ridden.” Church writers had long discussed incubi in demonology, and witch trial records sometimes accused witches of “riding” their victims at night. Nicolas Kiessling’s study The Incubus in English Literature, which the museum lists in its references, traces this history.

Later tradition Later writers have read the painting through psychology. Because it seems to show the inner world of a dream, it has often been linked with modern ideas about the unconscious and the psychology of dreams. Those readings belong to the twentieth century, not to Fuseli’s own time, so I treat them as later interpretation.

Modern Today the experience the painting describes has a medical name. Sleep paralysis is a state between sleep and waking in which a person cannot move and may feel a weight on the chest or sense a presence in the room. Many people who have had it recognize Fuseli’s scene at once. If this happens to you often, talk to a doctor, not a witch. Knowing that it is a known sleep state can take a lot of the fear out of it.

For a practitioner, the painting is also a reminder of how witch beliefs were built. The night visitor in old stories is almost always someone else’s fear projected outward. My page on witches in art looks at how images like this shaped what people thought witches did, and my history of witchcraft explains the difference between those fears and the craft people practice today.

Try it yourself

Here are the worksheet questions I use for every close reading. Copy them into a notebook, open the image as large as your screen allows, and give yourself twenty minutes. Fill them in order and do not skip ahead to meaning.

1. Basic information. Write down the title, artist, date, material, size and collection number from the At a glance box. Size matters: picture the real object on a wall or in your hand.
2. First look, two minutes. Before you read anything else, write three words for your first reaction.
3. Description. List at least fifteen things you can see, without explaining any of them. People, animals, objects, places, colors, marks, writing.
4. What is going on here? Then ask: what do I see that makes me say that? What more can I find?
5. Formal analysis. Where are the lightest and darkest areas? Where do the lines lead your eye? Is the space deep or shallow? What is the focal point?
6. Meaning in three levels. What is shown (a woman, a dog, an old man)? What story or theme do those things stand for? What does the work tell you about the time and place that made it?
7. Evidence check. Mark each statement you wrote with E for evidence you can see or document, I for an interpretation, and P for your personal response. For this painting, add one more: cover the demon and the horse with your hands. What is left, and how does the mood change?

If you want the full method with a worked example, my page on how to look at a painting walks through it step by step.

Sources and the museum page

The size, date, medium, credit line and object number above come from the Detroit Institute of Arts record for The Nightmare. For the background, Nicolas Powell’s short book Fuseli: The Nightmare is a classic introduction, and Kiessling’s The Incubus in English Literature covers the folklore. Erasmus Darwin’s verses appear in The Loves of the Plants (1789). The history of the word “mare” is in the Oxford English Dictionary.

If you want to keep going, compare this painting with the quiet, inward mood of Melencolia I by Dürer, then read my overview of the esoteric in art.