HENRY FUSELI –

Artist of Nightmare

An artist of the early Romantic period, who absorbed such ideas and assiduously cultivated fear, was the Swiss-born Henry Fuseli. He chose subjects like Satan bridging Chaos, a Shepherd's Dream, Fairies from Shakespeare and Hamlet's Ghost. Benjamin Haydon (1853) praised the latter as "the finest conception of a ghost there ever was painted... There it quivered with martial stride, pointing to a place of meeting with Hamlet; and round its visored head was a halo of light that looked sulphurous, and made one feel as if one actually smelt hell, burning, cindery, and suffocating. The dim moon glittered behind; the sea roared in the distance, as if agitated by the presence of a supernatural spirit; and the ghost looked at Hamlet, with eyes that glared like the light in the eyes of lion, which is savagely growling over his bloody food."

Fuseli, unlike his compositions, was not impressive to look at. What Haydon saw was "a little white-headed lion-faced man in an old flannel dressing-gown tied around his waist with a piece of rope and upon his head the bottom of Mrs Fuseli's work-basket." Today his most-reproduced work is The Nightmare (1782) which was painted after he had dreamed that he had made love to his unrequited sweetheart. It shows a young woman sleeping, her breast and legs dramatically thrust upwards, and the head of a phantom horse, with icy wisps of mane, rising above the bed. Perched on the woman's breast is a small hairy devil, impishly sinister. The horses's eyes bulge and its neck seems to strain to burst through the rent in the curtains and take possession of the world of shapes and solids. Rendered in apparitional whites and dusky-browns, it is a shudderingly effective visual landmark.

In 1788 Fuseli brought out Aphorisms on Art containing the following statements:

The loathsome is abominable, and no engine of expression.

Sympathy and disgust are the lines that separate terror from horror; though we shudder, we scarcely pity what we abominate.

The axe, the wheel, sawdust, and the blood-stained sheet are not legitimate substitutes for terror.

Fuseli is suggesting that 'terror' is an altogether superior emotion to horror. The latter, in seeking to make the gorge rise, dwells overmuch on messy, visceral excesses while terror strives to express a desolation and grandeur, a refined, doom-laden sadness and sense of the inevitability of fate. It also has that element of dark fantasy which Fuseli's own paintings convey.

Not only Fuseli, but Coleridge, Shelley, Lamb and De Quincey were fascinated by dreams, nightmares and waking visions. They studied them, set them down in their notebooks and recreated them in poetry and prose. In Ancient Greece, the lord of nightmare was Pan, who imbued the dreamer with a sense of fluctuation and instability. Night had the power of stripping away whatever patterns were woven in the day. And what of the association with the horse? The 'night-mare' refers to 'Mara' or the incubus that bears the dreamer to the otherworld of ghosts and shadows, the realm of Tom o' Bedlam and the Piper of Dreams. Horses were said to suffer from nightmares, at which times they would sweat, snort and shake their necks. Their manes, heavily knotted and impossible to comb, had to be burned out with blessed candles or excised by a cut shaped like a cross.

A classic account of the nightmare was furnished by John Bond (1763) who pointed out that it generally it seizes people who are sleeping on their backs. Afflicted by fearful images, they groan and sigh, find respiration difficult and feel "a violent oppression of the breast". They struggle to break the bonds of the nightmare but are constrained by the body's inability. The sensation of paralysis - of something pinning down their limbs - heightens the accompanying terror, as if they are clenched in the "jaws of death". If they do succeed in breaking free, they are afflicted by palpitations, anxiety, langour and uneasiness, "succeeded by the pleasing reflection of having escaped such imminent danger."

By then the erotic content of nightmares had been translated, not in terms of the sleeper's repressed desires, but rather of quiescent innocence being disrupted by strong-minded young succubi. In Pandaemonium (1684) Richard Bovet gave an account of a poor young man lying speechless on the bed who had been lying down for half an hour, trying to lapse into sleep, but unable to do so owing to an appalling headache, when there came into his room two very beautiful young women who "endeavoured to come into the bed to him, being one on the one side, the other on the other side thereof, which he resisted with all the power he could, striking at them several times with his fists, but could feel nothing but empty shadows; yet they were so strong that they drew all the bedclothes off him, though he tried with all his force to hold them, and after they had stripped him of his shirt, and he had contested with them so long that he concluded within himself that he should die of their violencies, during all that time he had no power to speak all call for aid."

Sometimes the nightmare utilised the archetypal Pan-Devil spectre of which there is more than a hint in Fuseli's painting. Paul Radestock (1879) quoted a sleeper who saw appear at the foot of his bed a small, hideous creature with dark eyes and narrow, wrinkled brow. It had a goat's beard, upright pointed ears "like Pan", a humped back and puffed-out chest. Taking hold of the edge of the bed, it shook it with tremendous force and said: "You will not remain here much longer!" At this the terrified man awoke and hurried to the cloister where he threw himself down before the altar "numbed by fear" and unable to move.

Read about fear in the Twentieth Century