The world’s weirdest painting hangs on a red wall in a third-floor gallery of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
“The Nightmare,” by Henry Fuseli, shows a swarthy goblin sitting atop a sleeping beauty. In the background, the head of a horse pushes its way through curtains. The painting has haunted viewers since its debut in London in 1782. Among the first people to see it was Horace Walpole, author of “The Castle of Otranto,” which is widely regarded as the first Gothic novel. He had one word for it, which he scribbled in his catalog: “shocking.”
Mary Shelley knew the painting, partly because her mother Mary Wollstonecraft once had a serious crush on the painter. An ominous line in “Frankenstein,” Shelley’s 1818 novel, may owe something to Fuseli’s strange vision: “I shall be with you on your wedding-night.”
That’s the threat the monster issues to Victor Frankenstein, who later describes the discovery of his murdered bride: “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.” A bedroom scene in the 1931 movie directed by James Whale is an homage to “The Nightmare.” Other movies have offered their own tributes.
When the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” struggles to describe a style of painting, he resorts to a comparison and cites the “concrete reveries of Fuseli.” Another horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft, has the narrator of his tale “Pickman’s Model” refer to the painter: “I don’t have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver.”
Even Sigmund Freud appreciated “The Nightmare.” He apparently kept a reproduction of it in the waiting room of his office in Vienna, though he never wrote about it.
Last year, the art historian and curator Christopher Baker published “Creator of Nightmares,” a new biography of Fuseli. “The painted Nightmare has been endlessly reproduced and has entered the streams of both scholarly work on the unconsciousness and the supernatural, as well as popular culture,” he wrote. “One of the key consequences of this is that many people would be able to summon up in their mind’s eye an image of the painting as it has retained an uncanny quality of recognition, but few could plot the life and career of its extraordinary creator.”
Even fewer may know how it wound up in Detroit.
Fuseli was born in Switzerland in 1741. He bounced around Europe and chose to pursue painting only as an adult. In Rome, he would lie down on his back and gaze up at the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling to study Michelangelo, whose influence may be seen in the beefy bodies that populate Fuseli’s paintings and illustrations.
Though he lacked technical training, Fuseli went on to establish himself as a mainstream figure in London’s art world and won election to the Royal Academy. The subjects of his paintings tend to draw from literary and mythological sources. The stories of Shakespeare were a favorite inspiration as he rendered the ghost from “Hamlet,” the witches from “Macbeth,” and Falstaff from “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
“The Nightmare” is different. It has no obvious source, nor does it have a clear meaning. Much of its enduring appeal comes from its unnerving ambiguity. The painting’s most basic question is impossible to answer: Whose nightmare is it? It could belong to the woman as she dreams of the terror on her torso. Or it could be our own, as we watch an incubus assault a defenseless victim.
Other aspects of the painting add to its enigma. The full-figured woman who reclines in her form-fitting dress is both provocative in pose and innocent in white. Bottles on the table beside her may contain sleeping drugs, perhaps the sort that conjure hallucinations of unwelcome visitants. The crouching imp is at once a pointy-eared demon with a cruel gaze and a pudgy dwarf who looks like he could sit on a bookshelf as a plush doll.
The horse is an odd element. It thrusts its oblong head through a red curtain in a manner that would have intrigued Freud. The beast is blind, too. Eyes are striking features in many of Fuseli’s paintings, but this animal has no pupils in its milky orbs. Its presence evokes folklore about monsters and midnight rides. It also suggests a pun. The words “mare” and “nightmare” look linked but in fact share no connection in etymology. Here, however, they combine in a bizarre and perhaps comic union.
Commentators often interpret “The Nightmare” as a portrayal of illicit desire or subconscious fear. For this reason, art historians have tended to see it as both an early expression of Romanticism and a forerunner of 20th-century Surrealism.
Its first recorded owner was a British baronet with an alliterative name: Brooke Boothby. For decades, the painting stayed in private collections and once was auctioned by Christie’s. Then, in the 1940s, Edgar Richardson, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, took an interest. He wanted to acquire it for his museum, which was building its collection. Yet the DIA’s board of trustees considered “The Nightmare” too strange, according to current DIA director Salvador Salort-Pons, in an article in 2023 for Ars Magazine, a Spanish-language publication.
After a gallery in New York City bought the painting and brought it to America in 1950, Richardson asked to borrow it. He displayed it in his office in the DIA and invited trustees to see it in person. This still failed to persuade them. A few months later, he returned it to the gallery. Then, in 1953, he approached Lawrence Fleischman, a Detroit-born art collector. He made Richardson’s dream for “The Nightmare” come true, agreeing to purchase the painting with his friend, Bert Smokler, a real-estate developer. They bought it for just $5,500 and donated it to the DIA.
The story might have ended there, with the successful acquisition and display of “The Nightmare.” But then came a possible breakthrough in how scholars and viewers interpret it.
A conservator in Detroit removed a piece of canvas covering the back of the painting, revealing a hidden portrait of an attractive young woman. Nobody knows her name, but one theory holds that she is Anna Landolt, the niece of a friend of Fuseli’s. If she is Anna, then the mysterious meaning of “The Nightmare” may literally lie beneath its surface.
On a visit to Switzerland in 1779, Fuseli had become infatuated with her. “She is mine, and I am hers. And have her I will,” he wrote in a letter. “What God or Nature hath joined, let no man—let no business-man sunder.” This last line alludes to the Gospel of Matthew but probably refers to the merchant who married Landolt, who seems not to have felt about Fuseli the way he felt about her. (In 1788, Fuseli married one of his models, Sophia Rawlins, who was 22 years his junior.)
The woman on the bed in “The Nightmare” looks a lot like the one whom Fuseli had concealed, from the big hair to the plunging neckline. The face of the fiend who squats on her, some observers have noted, bears at least a passing resemblance to the artist. “The Nightmare” could depict the pain of an unrequited love or, more disturbingly, a fantasy of revenge.
This second image remains hidden today. It’s still behind “The Nightmare,” facing the red wall on the third floor of the DIA.
“One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams,” Fuseli once wrote in a book of aphorisms. As for the undiscovered country of “The Nightmare” and its inscrutable meaning, the artist was just like one of his painting’s speechless onlookers: He never said.
John J. Miller is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College and the author of “Reading Around: Journalism on Authors, Artists, and Ideas.”
