Sat Upon my Heart, an Incubus
By: Remy Dean
Tags: Art History, Painting, Gothic, History, Art

The word ‘nightmare’ is derived from Viking folklore where ‘mara’ spirits bring bad dreams in the night and sit on the chests of the dreamers. This ‘night mara’ was probably confused with a ‘night mare’ and here Fuseli explores the linguistic mix-up, personifying both versions.

Misunderstood in its day, this represents the first time that the subconscious world of dreams is used as a direct inspiration for visual art — preceding the Surrealists by nearly two centuries. The only precedents could be paintings showing the religious visions of saints and works by Hieronymus Bosch.

Fuseli’s distinctive dark Romantic style is well showcased here and in his later variations of the theme. The Romantic movement itself was to come about as a reaction to the Enlightenment, developing out of a ‘re-discovery’ of the power of feelings, poetic inspiration, dreams, imaginings and the ultimate truth of the emotional response.

As with the Enlightenment in France, Romanticism in Britain began primarily as a literary and philosophical movement. Reflecting this, Fuseli illustrated scenes from the plays of Shakespeare and the Greek Myths. He had first visited England 1765 when he met fellow artist William Blake, becoming a friend and an acknowledged influence upon the younger artist.

After touring Europe, Fuseli returned to England where he became an associate of the Royal Academy and was then influenced by the figurative style that Blake had developed. The works of these two artists bear many similarities.

Fuseli wrote of his vivid fever dreams, often featuring combinations of erotic and frightening ingredients and in some interpretations it’s suggested that the goblin represents his primal desire for one of the several women he became infatuated with before meeting and marrying, Sophia Rawlins, who had been his model.

Interestingly, both he and Blake were associates of Mary Wollstonecraft, the educational reformist and women’s rights activist. Fuseli had painted her portrait, and reportedly had rejected her amorous advances! Notably, her daughter, Mary Shelley, authored of one of the great Gothic novels, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818.

Perhaps the work of Fuseli had exerted an influence, as it would on the imaginative fiction of many Gothic horror writers to come, including Edgar Allan Poe, who refers to The Nightmare in his novel of 1839, The Fall of the House of Usher:

an irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm

The Nightmare made its public debut in 1782 at the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts in London where it met a mixed reaction. It’s erotic subtext and morbid associations with the demonic and diseased fascinated many who saw it and it gradually insinuated itself into the public imagination.

another version of ‘The Nightmare’ painted by Henry Fuseli c.1790 [view license]

Fuseli painted several variations to meet demand, other artists also copied it. It was reproduced as a popular engraving, often printed and hand-coloured, becoming so reconisable that it developed into a satirical ‘meme’ of the early Nineteenth-Century, used to make comments on current affairs and political figures…

A widely circulated engraving by Thomas Burke was accompanied by a poetic vignette by, father of Charles, Erasmus Darwin: