Henry Fuseli was a Swiss painter best known for his Gothic painting The Nightmare.
Art historian Martin Myrone called him “a painter specialising in fantastic and strange imagery consonant with the literary Gothic.” But Henry Fuseli – with his reputation for opium abuse, his invented backstories and his love of supernatural pageants – did not confine the Gothic to canvas.
Fuseli was born in Zurich on 6 February 1741. After a false step as a Zwinglian minister, he found his calling as a humanist. He discovered the likes of Shakespeare and Milton in his pursuit of the arts. And his travels through Europe, and especially a trip to Italy in 1770, inspired him to become a painter. Upon his return to England in 1780, he fulfilled this dream with a painting called The Nightmare.
I risk absolutely nothing when I say that, with The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli created the quintessential Gothic painting. (You risk far more laying eyes on it.) The scene – a woman in the grip of restless sleep, weighed down by an incubus and watched by a spectral horse – has all the terrible obscurity necessary to be called sublime. It’s why I think Fuseli is the perfect subject for this, the first in a new series here on the Gothic Dispatch called Eulogies. These short essays, introductions to Gothic masters and servants, will be coming as often as they’re able. In the meantime, I thank you for reading this one.
Waking The Nightmare
The Nightmare appeared first at the 1782 Royal Academy of London. As with any sublime work, its audience found themselves horrified – yet unable to look away. His contemporaries agreed that it was unlike anything else ever produced. That is, until it was reproduced in an engraving by Thomas Burke the following year.
In fact, the painting’s continued reproduction and reimagining – even by its own creator – means you’ve probably already seen The Nightmare in some form or another. But in true Gothic fashion, it might be somewhat difficult to recall where, when or how.
You might know it from a variation of Fuseli’s own making. He painted this version between 1790 and 1791 to heighten the suggestions of love lost. Fuseli had himself suffered no shortage of spurned advances. As well as this reimagining, he was known to have poured his feelings into a number of lewd drawings that were destroyed after his death.
Maybe you recognise the image from the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. In it, Mary Shelley paints a similar picture of Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s betrothed, lying in the repose of death. It is unlikely a coincidence. Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist author and mother of Mary Shelley, was herself enamoured with the then-married Fuseli and may have later exposed her daughter to his work. The moment in the novel reads thus:
She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair.
Or perhaps you recall the composition from cinema. The German silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari pays celluloid tribute to Fuseli, as does James Whale’s 1931 adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel. In fact, as Vijay Mishra points out in The Gothic Sublime, most depictions of the unconscious Elizabeth are read “through the figure of Fuseli’s woman lying on a bed.”
For much of his life and career, Fuseli would continue to shape the way we see some of literature’s greatest characters.
Mischievous Fairies and Fearsome Spirits
Later in his career, Fuseli returned to some of his earliest literary influences.
History painting was booming in countries like France and Italy – but there was not yet an established school in England. Enter publisher John Boydell. He saw England’s rich literature as the ideal basis for history paintings. In 1789, after three years of planning, the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery opened.
Fuseli’s love of Shakespeare made the project irresistible. Among the 34 paintings on display at the gallery’s opening were two works by Fuseli. At the gallery’s peak, he was responsible for nine of its 170 works. Of particular interest to Fuseli were scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Like the incubus weighing down The Nightmare, these paintings twisted Shakespeare’s mischievous fairies into fearsome spirits. For Robin Goodfellow (Puck), Fuseli even drew on a second work, Thomas Percy’s ballad The Merry Pranks of Robin Goodfellow. The result is not very merry at all.
By the end of the 18th century, interest in the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery was waning, due in no small part to imitators. (Fuseli, the scoundrel, also exhibited for at least one of them.) Fuseli turned his attention to his other great literary influence. In 1799, he exhibited 47 paintings based on the life and works of John Milton. Those who knew Fuseli considered Milton the perfect subject for him. “Like Milton,” wrote Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, “[Fuseli] seems quite at home in hell.”
But it would not last. The exhibition was a financial flop. Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, as we can imagine it would have been called, became one of Fuseli’s few dreams that are lost to obscurity.
Henry Fuseli Becomes Gothic
To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.
So wrote Edmund Burke of the sublime. In Gothic literature, writers achieve the effect of obscurity not just through the dark castle or the ruined monastery but through textual conceits like the “found” manuscript or the story within a story. In painting, Fuseli dreamed of doing the same. He wanted to take the Gothic off the canvas. And while The Nightmare is his most well-known work and his history paintings his most numerous, it’s somewhere in between them – both chronologically and stylistically – that I think he most realises this dream.
Just as he would later take influence from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth and Paradise Lost, Fuseli turned in the 1780s to an obscure Arabic manuscript discovered in Toledo in the 15th century. The Provencal Tales of Kyot tell of an evil wizard, Urma, his bewitching of Belisane and her rescue by the knight Percival. Fuseli made two works illustrating scenes from this Gothic romance. The second, depicting the climactic moment before Percival brings down his sword on Urma, was on display at the Royal Academy in 1783, just a year after The Nightmare.
Only years later did Fuseli admit that the literary basis of the paintings, The Provencal Tales of Kyot, was an invention. Like Horace Walpole, William Beckford and countless other Gothic artists before him, Fuseli had obscured his work not just aesthetically but textually. In his efforts to seem Gothic, he became it. He is to the genre what they are – a master.
Among those who called Henry Fuseli an influence were William Blake, Mary Shelley and James Whale. The Nightmare is on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, USA. You can find more Fuseli works in the Tate Britain, London, UK.