Nachtmahr : John Henry Fuseli
John Henry Fuseli – Nachtmahr 1781
First shown at the Royal Academy of London in 1782, Fuseli painted at least three other versions of this composition. Contemporary critics considered it scandalous because of its overtly sexual theme.
An engraving by Thomas Burke and published by John Raphael Smith in 1783 was accompanied by this poem, “Night-Mare”, by Erasmus Darwin🡕:
So on his Nightmare through the evening fog
Flits the squab Fiend o’er fen, and lake, and bog;
Seeks some love-wilder’d maid with sleep oppress’d,
Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.
Nachtmahr (1781) by John Henry Fuseli is currently in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts in Detroit, Michigan. (link🡕)
Tags ⇒ eroticism, gothic, horror, incubus, John Henry Fuseli, nightmare, painting, Romanticism