Name: How To Paint A Nightmare
Uploaded: 2026-01-21T16:57:58.000Z
Duration: 6 min 35 s
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My first book of essays is out in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook, which I read.

Adverbs of degree

If you like the Nerdwriter, I'm pretty confident you'll like this book, too.

In 1781, the Swiss painter Henri Fuseli painted A Nightmare.

Exhibited the following year at the Royal Academy in London, it was instantly popular.

In just a few short months, it was engraved, then made into prints and sent around Europe, eventually the world, where it had countless admirers.

What did people see in Fuseli's dark vision?

The nightmare depicts a woman in a white nightgown, asleep, head and arms draped over the edge of her bed.

Next to the bed, there's a small circular night table on which we can see a book, a glass vial, a couple containers, and

In the upper left, a truly creepy horse with white eyes and pointy ears poking through a red curtain looks in the direction of an imp or a goblin or an incubus perched on the chest of the sleeping woman, looking directly at you.

What are we actually seeing in this painting?

that adds a layer of unsettling ambiguity to the painting, which is, after all, what nightmares are all about.

The word nightmare is derived from the Old English word mare, the name for a malevolent demon or fiend from Germanic and Slavic folklore that rides on people's chests while they sleep, inducing bad dreams and a feeling of suffocation.

Now, this is not to be confused with the word mare, meaning female horse, which has no etymological connection to nightmare.

Though Fuseli was no doubt aware that the viewer might make that false connection, the painting encourages you to make whatever connections you can.

It offers no easy answers, and Fuseli didn't either.

One common interpretation maintains that the incubus is Fuseli himself and the woman is Anna Lanhold, who he fell in love with a couple years prior in Zurich, but

who married another man with better prospects.

Unable to be with her in life, Fuseli haunts his beloved in dreams, dark and erotic dreams.

This theory is supported by an interesting fact.

On the back of this iconic canvas is actually another painting, an unfinished portrait of a woman many believe is Anna Landhold.

Of course, this is just one of many interpretations, and that's really the point.

Fuseli, I think, wants you to grasp for meaning, but not to find it.

Assigning meaning, after all, is a form of control.

Something we all try to do with art, something I'm doing right now.

But when meaning remains elusive, as it does here, we lose control, and

We become vulnerable to the emotional power of the experience.

Fuseli heightens this emotional impact in a few ways.

First and foremost is the intense chiaroscuro effect between the sleeper with her bright white nightgown and the muted, earthy colors of the Incubus, the horse, the night table and curtain, as well as the deep black shadows all around them.

It's a dramatic composition, made more so by the curtain that isolates the foreground action as if it were on a stage.

This reminds me of the work of Caravaggio, master of drama, for whom Fuseli had deep admiration.

He, too was able to create a sensation of depth with lighting alone, without needing to put in a distant background.

The effect of this is that the figures seem to push forward, almost emerging from the frame, which in this case is a frightening prospect.

The emotional response you have to horror, that simultaneous repulsion attraction, is what made the Nightmare so popular.

It's also what makes it a key moment in the rise of Romanticism, which is itself an emotional response to Age of Enlightenment ideals exemplified in neoclassicist art.

Fuseli was educated and trained in the techniques of neoclassicism, but

his sensibility was romantic, even Gothic, as it clearly is here.

The Nightmare shined a light that in the following decades, Romanticism's great artists, like Goethe, Mary Shelley, Byron and Blake would follow into the dark.

That is, after all, where this painting lives.

In the shadows of our heart, the fear we have of what might happen.

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