You wake up in the dark and the room is exactly where you left it, the ceiling, the edge of the curtain, the grey of the window. You go to turn over and nothing happens. Your arms won’t lift and your mouth won’t open, and there’s a weight on your chest that wasn’t there when you fell asleep, heavy enough that every breath feels like work. Then comes the part people remember: the certainty that something is in the room with you, close to the bed, watching.
In 1781 Henry Fuseli painted that night. Fuseli’s The Nightmare is a woman thrown back across a bed in a white gown, her head and one arm hanging over the edge, a squat demon sitting on her chest, and a horse’s head with blank white eyes pushing through the curtain behind her. What it means starts with the word: the nightmare was once the demon itself, a spirit that sat on sleepers and smothered them, and the horse is Fuseli’s pun on top of it. The painting hangs in the Detroit Institute of Arts, whose label is exact about what it does: it “suggests the way the woman feels in the grip of a demonic nightmare, not what she sees.”
The Nightmare, 1781: the painting that shocked London
Fuseli was Swiss, a painter and writer living in London, and he made the first drawing for it in chalk, writing “St. Martin’s Lane, March 1781” in the margin. There was no horse in it. His first biographer, John Knowles, owned that sheet and says the horse’s head was “this subsequent thought”, added in the painting.
The canvas went into the Royal Academy’s exhibition of 1782 as number 64, and by Knowles’s account it “excited, as it naturally would, an uncommon degree of interest.” Part of the stir was the subject. Fuseli painted Milton and Shakespeare for years, but this one has no single literary source, only his fascination with dreams, in a form that shocked the public. One of his own aphorisms begins “One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams.”
The other part was her. She lies on her back in a thin gown with her throat bared and her arms loose, and the demon squats on her as if she were furniture. Within months, verses in The Universal Magazine read her as a “love-wilder’d maid” with a “blushing head”, and the argument over how much desire is in the picture has never stopped; in 1972 Marcia Allentuck titled her essay on it “Eroticism or Pornography?” The word for the demon carries the same charge. Latin incubo is the one who lies down on the sleeper, and by about 1200 an incubus in English was the demon blamed for nightmares and, in male form, for coming to women in their sleep.
The light in The Nightmare: where it comes from
There’s no candle in the room and no window. The light comes from our side of the picture, from the left, and it lands hardest on her, the white gown, the bare arm, the face upside down at the edge of the mattress, so the brightest thing in the painting is the one person who can’t do anything. The demon gets a side light, enough to show its face turned out toward us with its chin on its fist. The horse gets almost nothing except its eyes, which Fuseli left white, without pupils.
With the house lights up the room comes back: red curtains, a round table with a glass phial and a little box on it, the gown spilling off the bed. In the dark it is three things, a body, a weight and a pair of eyes, close to what sleep researchers would pull apart two centuries later.
Why is there a horse in The Nightmare? The word, explained
The horse is the joke everyone repeats: night, mare, so Fuseli put a mare in the night. It works as a pun, and Knowles himself calls it “the head of the mare.” But the word never had a horse in it.
Old English had two words that sounded alike. One was the horse, mearh, with the feminine meare or mere. The other was mare, a goblin, from a Germanic root that also gave German Mahr and Old Norse mara: the thing that came at night and sat on you. Nightmare, first written around 1300, is built from that second word, and it named “an evil female spirit afflicting men (or horses) in their sleep with a feeling of suffocation.”
So the demon on her chest is the mare. The horse is Fuseli’s pun laid over it, and the old definition even lets the horses in, since the spirit afflicted them too.
- Old EnglishTwo words that sound alike. Mearh, feminine meare or mere: a horse. Mare, from mera, mære: a goblin that sits on sleepers.
- c. 1300Nightmare appears: “an evil female spirit afflicting men (or horses) in their sleep with a feeling of suffocation.”
- Mid-1500sThe word slides from the spirit to the smothering feeling it causes.
- 1781Fuseli paints the goblin on her chest, then adds a horse’s head his first drawing didn’t have.
- 1829Nightmare is recorded meaning any bad dream.
- 1831And any very distressing experience.
Is The Nightmare about sleep paralysis?
What the old word describes, a weight on the chest, no breath, no movement and terror, has a clinical name now. Sleep paralysis happens when the muscle shutdown of REM sleep carries on after the mind has woken up, and most people who have it go on dreaming through it, wide awake. The eyes still move and a feeling of suffocation is common. An episode usually lasts from a few seconds to twenty minutes, six on average, and it’s most likely when you sleep on your back, the way Fuseli laid her down.
In 2011 Brian Sharpless and Jacques Barber pulled together 35 studies covering 36,533 people:
Most people who have an episode are frightened by it: in one student sample, 90% reported fear. In 1999 J. Allan Cheyne of the University of Waterloo and two colleagues sorted what people sense during episodes into three clusters. One they called Intruder: a sensed presence, fear, things seen and heard. Another they called Incubus, using the old name: pressure on the chest, trouble breathing, pain. The third was floating and leaving the body. The painting holds the first two, the weight on her and the eyes at the curtain.
Fuseli’s first audience didn’t need the science. Erasmus Darwin, a physician as well as a poet, reworked the Universal Magazine verses for The Loves of the Plants in 1789, and they describe an episode almost clinically:
“In vain to scream with quivering lips she tries, / And strains in palsy’d lids her tremulous eyes; / In vain she wills to run, fly, swim, walk, creep; / The WILL presides not in the bower of SLEEP.”
Erasmus Darwin, The Loves of the Plants, Canto III
His note under the line says sleep “consists in the abolition of all voluntary power”, and that “when there arises in sleep a painful desire to exert the voluntary motions, it is called the Nightmare or Incubus.” The eyes strain while the will gets nowhere, the split the clinicians describe, set down two centuries earlier.
The print that made The Nightmare famous
Fuseli sold the painting for twenty guineas. Thomas Burke engraved it, John Raphael Smith published the print in January 1783, and according to Knowles, Smith admitted to making upwards of five hundred pounds from it, “although vended at a small price”, more than twenty times what the painter was paid. The stipple engraving, its tones built out of tiny dots, sold across Britain and Europe with the opening lines of those verses lettered underneath.
Satirists had it within weeks. In March 1783 a print laid the prime minister, Lord Shelburne, in her place, asleep on the spikes of the peace treaty’s articles, and in 1784 Thomas Rowlandson laid Charles James Fox there, naked, with a dice-box where Fuseli had put the phial.
Fuseli went back to it too. Four or possibly five painted versions are known. The one in Frankfurt, from 1790 to 1791, turns the room upright and drains the colour toward a pallid, bluish white.
The last of those plates came from the bookseller Joseph Johnson, who published Darwin and was also Mary Wollstonecraft’s publisher. An engraving of it hung in Sigmund Freud’s apartment in Vienna in the 1920s, and he kept a reproduction of Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead in his office. In January 1969 the Journal of the American Medical Association put the painting on its cover, with Jerome M. Schneck’s “Henry Fuseli, Nightmare, and Sleep Paralysis” inside.
The Nightmare and Frankenstein
Fuseli was, in William Godwin’s words, “one of Mr. Johnson’s oldest friends”, at Johnson’s house two or three times a week, and Mary Wollstonecraft met him among Johnson’s guests. Godwin, who later married her, wrote in his 1798 memoir of her that she “conceived a personal and ardent affection for him. Mr. Fuseli was a married man”, and at the end of 1792 she left for France, with Fuseli, Godwin believed, one of her main reasons. She died on 10 September 1797, eleven days after giving birth to her daughter with Godwin, Mary, who would write Frankenstein.
In the 1818 novel the Creature makes Victor a promise, “I shall be with you on your wedding-night”, and keeps it. Victor hears a scream and runs into the room:
“She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair.”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818, Volume III, Chapter VI
Critics have set that sentence beside Fuseli’s painting since at least the 1970s. The scholar Fabien Desset, in a 2021 chapter, is careful with the link: the versions of the painting differ from each other, and the bedside horrors of Gothic novels may have shaped the scene even more. Mary Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 edition, describing the waking vision the novel began from, has its own bedside: the creator “opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. I opened mine in terror.”
Film found the pose too. In James Whale’s Frankenstein of 1931, the Creature comes through the window of Elizabeth’s room on her wedding day, and when the household reaches her she is draped across the bed in her wedding dress, in the painting’s pose. The film lets her live. The pose is the novel’s sentence, and it’s the one Fuseli painted.
So Sick of Feeling, an XPRMTS open edition, is that terror seen from inside. A woman stands waist-deep in dark water with flames climbing all around her, one hand pressed over her face, and its words run “I try to scream but no one hears / I try to flee but no one sees.” Fuseli paints the body from beside the bed; this one paints the scream that will not come out.
Frequently asked questions
What is the meaning of The Nightmare by Fuseli?
It paints the nightmare in its old sense, a spirit that sits on a sleeper’s chest and smothers her, along with the terror of that night. The horse through the curtain is Fuseli’s pun on the word. From the start people also read desire in it, and the argument over how much is still going.
Where is The Nightmare painting now?
The 1781 original is in the Detroit Institute of Arts, which bought it in 1955. The upright version of 1790 to 1791 belongs to the Freies Deutsches Hochstift and is in the Frankfurter Goethe-Museum.
Did The Nightmare inspire Frankenstein?
Critics have argued for it since the 1970s. Mary Shelley’s mother knew Fuseli well, and Elizabeth’s death in the 1818 novel, thrown across the bed with her head hanging down, is close to the painting, though Gothic novels were full of bedside scenes too.
How many versions of The Nightmare did Fuseli paint?
Four or possibly five. The best known after Detroit’s is the Frankfurt picture, in an upright format with paler colour.
Read next
- Goya’s Black Paintings, art made for no audience, room by room.
- Bloodborne’s Victorian Gothic, Dracula, Doré’s London and the architecture of dread.
- The sublime in art, John Martin’s apocalypses and why terror can be beautiful.
- Why Isle of the Dead feels haunted, five islands, Rachmaninoff and Alien.
References
- Detroit Institute of Arts, Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, 55.5.A: label, dimensions, credit line, provenance and published references (including Royal Academy, London, 1782, no. 64): dia.org
- John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, London, Colburn and Bentley, 1831, vol. 1, p. 64 (the drawing of March 1781, twenty guineas, Burke and Smith); vol. 3, Aphorism 231: gutenberg.org, archive.org
- Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, Der Nachtmahr, 1790/91: freies-deutsches-hochstift.de; object record IV-1953-033, 76.5 × 63.6 cm: museum-digital
- Erasmus Darwin, The Loves of the Plants, 1789, Canto III, lines 51–78 and notes (quoted from the 1790 text), and Appendix 1.3, the 1782 version from The Universal Magazine, vol. 71, September 1782, in Tristanne Connolly (ed.), Romantic Circles Editions, 2025: romantic-circles.org
- Marcia Allentuck, “Henry Fuseli’s ‘Nightmare’: Eroticism or Pornography?”, in Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730–1970, New York, 1972, pp. 33–41.
- Online Etymology Dictionary, “nightmare”, “mare (n.1)”, “mare (n.3)”, “incubus”: etymonline.com
- Brian A. Sharpless, “A clinician’s guide to recurrent isolated sleep paralysis”, Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 12 (2016), pp. 1761–1767: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Brian A. Sharpless and Jacques P. Barber, “Lifetime prevalence rates of sleep paralysis: a systematic review”, Sleep Medicine Reviews 15, no. 5 (2011), pp. 311–315: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- J. Allan Cheyne, Steve D. Rueffer and Ian R. Newby-Clark, “Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations during sleep paralysis: neurological and cultural construction of the night-mare”, Consciousness and Cognition 8, no. 3 (1999), pp. 319–337: doi.org
- Jerome M. Schneck, “Henry Fuseli, Nightmare, and Sleep Paralysis”, JAMA 207, no. 4 (27 January 1969), pp. 725–726: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Thomas Burke after Henry Fuseli, The Night Mare, stipple engraving, published by J. R. Smith, 1783: Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 783.01.30.01: collections.library.yale.edu
- British Museum, The night mare or hag riddn minister, 4 March 1783, 1868,0808.4936; Thomas Rowlandson, The Covent Garden Night Mare, 1784, 1851,0901.195, with M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum, vols. V and VI, 1935 and 1938: britishmuseum.org
- William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, London, J. Johnson, 1798: gutenberg.org
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818, Volume III, Chapter VI: gutenberg.org; Introduction to the 1831 edition: gutenberg.org
- Fabien Desset, “Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare(s) in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)”, in Isabelle Hervouet and Anne Rouhette (eds.), Dream and Literary Creation in Women’s Writings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Anthem Press, 2021, pp. 157–176: cambridge.org
- Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, Universal Pictures, 1931.
- Images: the Detroit Institute of Arts and Freies Deutsches Hochstift paintings and Thomas Burke’s 1783 print, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Thomas Holloway’s 1791 plate, Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The drawing of the view from the pillow is original.