Tate Britain
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Nightmare is a 1781 painting by Henry Fuseli.
Being in the grips of a nightmare is a common occurrence that we can all relate to, but we may never experience one exactly as a particular artist depicts it. Here Fuseli conjures up a terrifying image filled with mystery, panic, and yet with a vague and disturbing familiarity. It suggests the way the woman feels in the grip of a demonic nightmare, not what she sees. The Nightmare was reproduced as an engraving; a copy hung in Sigmund Freud's apartment in Vienna in the 1920s.
In the twentieth century
Fuseli's Nightmare reverberated with twentieth-century psychological theorists. In 1926, American writer Max Eastman paid a visit to Sigmund Freud and claimed to have seen a print of The Nightmare displayed next to Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson in Freud's Vienna apartment. Psychoanalyst and Freud biographer Ernest Jones chose another version of Fuseli's painting as the frontispiece of his book On the Nightmare (1931), however neither Freud nor Jones mentioned these paintings in their writings about dreams. Carl Jung included The Nightmare and other Fuseli works in his Man and His Symbols (1964).
Tate Britain held an exhibition titled Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination between February 15 and May 1, 2006, with Fuseli's Nightmare as the central exhibit. The catalog indicated the painting's influence on films such as the original Frankenstein (1931) and The Marquise of O (1976). Among modern artists, Balthus appears to have incorporated elements of The Nightmare in his work (e.g., The Room, 1952–54).