Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781

It's eyes. His eyes. Her proportions. The colors. The tones. Even the brush strokes.
That is what the painting has going against it. The title speaks for the painting… a nightmare.

The moment I look at Fuseli’s painting, I am drawn straight to the ape’s eyes. Our irises meet and intertwine in a demented spiral. He sits upon this woman. All the weight of the darkness around him pushes down on her, suppressing all the light within the bottom half of the painting. It provokes an uncomfortable feeling; the words weird and creepy come to mind. Then my eyes meet the horse, which I never find the ability to take seriously with his Ping-Pong eyeballs and his head erupting from the curtains from nothingness.

To further place the viewer into a state of discomfort, the painting carries a sexual sense to it. The woman lies in a vulnerable position, with her arms adding a possibility of sex. Within this floating around in my head, the idea that this scene becomes more disturbing. This horrid creature, hunched over, just sitting on top her as he stares at you. He knows you’re looking at him. I feel as if I have just walked into a room, interrupting his thoughts. His eyebrows and frown form an expression of hate. Not necessarily to the viewer, but at himself. What he is or has become.

I dislike Fuseli’s painting because I cannot help but feel like the product was a failed attempt. I look at the work and see an idea Fuseli was tackling. He has produced this scene to represent a disturbing setting, a nightmare. In a physiological sense, the work depicts the mind in an unconscious state and we’re seeing a glimpse at her dreams. While this is a cool concept to capture, I think he falls short in the simplicity of it. To make the subject as simple as he did and have the proportions be off, the idea falls through.

Before setting paint to this canvas, Fuseli’s proposal of marriage had been rejected by the father of an Anna Landholdt in Zürich. It is believed that this composition, which he has done three different variations, was a direct result to this denial. In the end this happens to be his most well known work. Having never commented on the painting, we can only see what feelings and emotions he decided to share with us on the canvas, which left contemporary critics speculating.