Құбыжық түсі

1781 painting by Henry Fuseli
the painting

The Nightmare is a 1781 oil painting by Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. It shows a woman in deep sleep with her arms thrown below her, and with a demonic and ape like incubus crouched on her chest. The painting's dreamlike and haunting erotic evocation of infatuation and obsession was a huge popular success. After its first exhibition, at the 1782 Royal Academy of London, critics and patrons reacted with horrified fascination and the work became widely popular, to the extent that it was parodied in political satire and an engraved version was widely distributed. In response, Fuseli produced at least three other versions. Interpretations vary. The canvas seems to portray simultaneously a dreaming woman and the content of her nightmare. The incubus and horse's head refer to contemporary belief and folklore about nightmares but have been ascribed more specific meanings by some theorists. Contemporary critics were taken aback by the overt sexuality of the painting, since interpreted by some scholars as anticipating Jungian ideas about the unconscious.

Contemporary critics often found the work scandalous due to its sexual themes. A few years earlier Fuseli had fallen for a woman named Anna Landholdt in Zürich, while travelling from Rome to London. Landholdt was the niece of his friend, the Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater. Fuseli wrote of his fantasies to Lavater in 1779; "Last night I had her in bed with me—tossed my bedclothes hugger mugger—wound my hot and tight clasped hands about her—fused her body and soul together with my own—poured into her my spirit, breath and strength. Anyone who touches her now commits adultery and incest! She is mine, and I am hers. And have her I will. " In Woman as Sex Object (1972), Marcia Allentuck similarly argues that the painting's intent is to show female orgasm. This is supported by Fuseli's sexually overt and even pornographic private drawings (e. g., Symplegma of Man with Two Women, 1770–78). and its German equivalent, Albtraum (literally ), evoke the image of a malevolent being that causes bad dreams by sitting on the chest of the sleeper. The Royal Academy exhibition brought Fuseli and his painting enduring fame. The exhibition included Shakespeare themed works by Fuseli, which won him a commission to produce eight paintings for publisher John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. One version of The Nightmare hung in the home of Fuseli's close friend and publisher Joseph Johnson, gracing his weekly dinners for London thinkers and writers. The Nightmare was widely plagiarised, and parodies of it were commonly used for political caricature, by George Cruikshank, Thomas Rowlandson, and others. In these satirical scenes, the incubus afflicts subjects such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis XVIII, British politician Charles James Fox, and Prime Minister William Pitt. In another example, admiral Lord Nelson is the demon, and his mistress Emma, Lady Hamilton, the sleeper. While some observers have viewed the parodies as mocking Fuseli, it is more likely that The Nightmare was simply a vehicle for ridicule of the caricatured subject. The Danish painter, Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard, whom Fuseli had met in Rome, produced his own version of The Nightmare (Danish: Mareridt) which develops on the eroticism of Fuseli's work. Abildgaard's painting shows two naked women asleep in the bed; it is the woman in the foreground who is experiencing the nightmare and the incubus—which is crouched on the woman's stomach, facing her parted legs—has its tail nestling between her exposed breasts. Fuseli painted other versions of The Nightmare following the success of the first; at least three survive. The other important canvas was painted between 1790 and 1791 and is held at the Goethe Museum in Frankfurt. It is smaller than the original, and the woman's head lies to the left; a mirror opposes her on the right. The demon is looking at the woman rather than out of the picture, and it has pointed, catlike ears. The most significant difference in the remaining two versions is an erotic statuette of a couple on the table. Edgar Allan Poe may have evoked The Nightmare in his short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839). His narrator compares a painting hanging in Usher's house to a Fuseli work, and reveals that an "irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm".

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 15 February and 1 May 2006, with the Nightmare as the central exhibit. The catalogue indicated the painting's influence on films such as the original Frankenstein (1931) and The Marquise of O (1976). Among modern artists, Balthus incorporated elements of The Nightmare in his work (e. g., The Room (1952–54). The 2015 documentary The Nightmare may be a reference to the painting as it documents sleep paralysis sufferers (who often hallucinate creatures sitting on their chest). Famous drag queen Katya Zamolodchikova released an EP titled Vampire Fitness in November 2020. The EP cover art is a direct reference to The Nightmare, with Katya portraying both the woman and the demon over her body. She even included a horse statue in one corner of the room. It serves as a modern reinterpretation of the painting, with the woman appearing completely nude, except for a pair of sunglasses. In February 2021, Amaia Salazar, a postdoctoral researcher and visual artist, conducts intense research on the pictorial representation of sleep paralysis throughout the history of art (18th 21st century), analysing and discovering similar prototypes and archetypes of artistic representation, inspired by Fuseli's artwork. In January 2023 Martin Rowson produced a cartoon, "after Fuseli (and everyone else)", for The Guardian to comment on the ethical problems of the UK government, with a Conservative Party majority. The cartoon features Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, and Nadhim Zahawi plus a horse with a hot water bottle.