The waking nightmare: How fuseli painted our fears before freud

This exiled Swiss, who signed his canvases “Henry Fuseli” to better charm the English public, was far more than a painter of monsters. He was the archaeologist of modern terrors, the cartographer of the shadowy realms that the Enlightenment’s reason had believed banished. When Freud theorized the unconscious a century later, he was only putting words to images Fuseli had already painted: repressed sexuality, gnawing guilt, desires that twist into nightmares. But how did a man of the eighteenth century, trained in theology and the classics, come to explore these forbidden territories? And why do his canvases, even today, seem to watch us from the darkest corners of our psyche?

---

01The man who preferred demons to angels

To understand Fuseli, one must first imagine the Zurich of his childhood: a Protestant city where sermons thundered against “papist temptations,” where children memorized psalms before they could hold a brush. The son of a painter and art biographer, Johann Heinrich grew up surrounded by books—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare—and engravings depicting the torments of the damned. His father, Johann Caspar Füssli, wanted to make a pastor of him, but the young man had other demons to feed. At twenty, he fled Switzerland after being implicated in a political pamphlet, leaving behind a reputation as a rebel and an enduring fascination with the occult.

His arrival in London in 1764 marked the beginning of a double life. By day, he frequented the salons of the Royal Academy, where Joshua Reynolds championed a noble and moralizing art. By night, he haunted the shadowy bookshops of Covent Garden, searching for treatises on demonology and accounts of possession. Between these two worlds, Fuseli forged the identity of an artist cursed before his time. “I do not paint what I see, but what I feel,” he reportedly told his friend William Blake, another visionary genius of the era. This phrase encapsulates his entire approach: for him, art was not an imitation of nature, but a dive into the abysses of the imagination.

His London studio, near Soho, was a clutter of plaster casts, theater masks, and erotic engravings. Visitors described a room bathed in a greenish light, where shadows seemed to move on their own. Fuseli often worked there at night, by candlelight, as if he feared the clarity of day would dissolve his visions. It was there that he developed his distinctive technique: translucent glazes for ghostly flesh, thick impasto for draperies that seemed stirred by an invisible wind. Once finished, his canvases had the strange power to haunt those who looked at them. As if, by painting nightmares, he had given them a tangible existence.

---

02The night the horse entered the bedroom

The Nightmare (1781) is undoubtedly Fuseli’s most famous—and most misunderstood—work. At first glance, it seems to illustrate a Germanic legend: the Nachtmahr, a nocturnal demon that crushes sleepers with its weight. But look closer. The young woman is not a passive victim: her half-naked body molds to the curves of the mattress in a posture that hovers between surrender and provocation. Her face, turned toward us, almost seems to smile, as if she were enjoying this monstrous embrace. As for the incubus, it is not a mere demon, but a hybrid creature, half-man, half-ape, its lecherous gaze seeming to pierce the canvas.

Fuseli’s contemporaries were shocked by this blend of sensuality and horror. Some saw in it an allegory of syphilis, the “lover’s disease” ravaging Europe. Others read it as a political metaphor: the horse, symbol of rebellion, crushing slumbering reason. But the true revolution of this painting lies in its composition. Fuseli invents a new way of representing space. The room is not a realistic setting, but a psychic place, warped by fear. The curtains hang like shreds of flesh, the mirror reflects a light that does not exist, and the horse seems to emerge from another world, as if the canvas were a membrane between reality and dream.

What still fascinates today is the way Fuseli captured the very essence of the nightmare: that sensation of suffocation, that inability to move or scream, that mix of desire and terror. The Surrealists would later take up this idea. But where Dalí or Ernst intellectualize the dream, Fuseli paints it with an almost physical rawness. As if he had sensed that our most intimate fears are not abstract, but carnal.

---

03Lady Macbeth, or the art of painting madness

If The Nightmare is a dive into the collective unconscious, Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking (1784) is a clinical study of guilt. The scene, taken from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, shows the tyrant’s wife, haunted by the murder of Duncan, wandering the halls of her castle with a candle in hand, desperately trying to wash the imaginary blood from her hands. Fuseli does not merely illustrate the play: he reveals its psychological dimension, long before psychiatry took an interest in madness.

Observe the details. Lady Macbeth’s fingers, clenched like claws, betray extreme tension. Her nightgown, a spectral white, seems to float around her like a shroud. And above all, that face: eyes wide open but blind, mouth slightly agape in a silent scream. Fuseli studied the insane at Bedlam Asylum to render this expression of pure terror. Some historians even believe he used a famous patient, known for her sleepwalking fits, as his model. The result is terrifying, because it is universal: who has never felt, in the dead of night, the weight of an old fault rising to the surface?

This painting also marks a turning point in the representation of women in art. Until then, Shakespearean heroines were idealized figures, like Delacroix’s romantic Ophelias. Fuseli, however, shows Lady Macbeth as a fallen creature, both monstrous and pathetic. Her body, deformed by guilt, has nothing of academic grace. She is a real woman, with her flaws and obsessions. In this, Fuseli anticipates the psychological portraits of the twentieth century, from Bacon to Freud (Lucian, not Sigmund).

---

04The monster laboratory: anatomy of an obsession

Fuseli did not merely paint nightmares—he dissected them. His approach to art was almost scientific, blending anatomical study with mythic exploration. To understand his creatures, one must enter his studio, that place where reason gave way to hallucination.

He always began with preparatory drawings, hundreds of sketches in which he tested poses, expressions, and the play of light and shadow. His notebooks teem with hybrid figures: men with animal heads, women with elongated limbs, demons with multiple eyes. These studies are not mere drafts, but experiments. Fuseli explores the limits of the human body, like a mad scientist seeking to unlock the secrets of fear.

His pictorial technique reflects this obsession with detail. He uses glazes for flesh, those translucent layers of paint that give faces a cadaverous pallor. For draperies, he layers thick impasto, creating movement effects that seem to animate the canvas. And then there are the colors: deep blacks, blood reds, emerald greens that darken over time (due to Scheele’s green, an arsenic-based pigment). These hues are not chosen at random. In Fuseli’s work, red always symbolizes desire or violence. Green, decomposition. As for black, it is never a mere background, but a living, almost organic matter.

His models? Theater actors, Soho prostitutes, sometimes even corpses. He attended dissections to study expressions of pain. One anecdote claims he kept a human skull in his studio, which he called “my advisor.” This fascination with death is not morbid, but almost sacred. For Fuseli, painting a body was about revealing its soul—or what passed for one.

---

05The scandal of the fairies: when Shakespeare becomes erotic

In 1793, Fuseli presented Titania Caressing Bottom with the Head of an Ass, a canvas inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At first glance, it is a whimsical scene: the Fairy Queen, Titania, embracing a man transformed into a donkey by Puck’s magic. But look closer. The fairies surrounding the couple have the faces of lecherous old men. Their slender hands caress Bottom’s fur with unsettling sensuality. As for Titania, her gaze is that of a woman in the grip of forbidden desire.

The critics of the time were scandalized. How dare he turn a lighthearted comedy into an allegory of bestiality? Some saw an attack on the monarchy (Bottom, the man-ass, representing the oppressed people). Others a satire of London high society’s morals, where aristocrats often behaved like beasts. But Fuseli’s true audacity lies in his way of blending eroticism and the fantastic. For him, fairies are not innocent creatures, but ambivalent beings, both seductive and monstrous.

This painting also marks a turning point in his career. After years of painting nightmares, Fuseli explores here a new vein: that of poetic grotesque. The bodies are deformed, the proportions exaggerated, but the result is not ugly. On the contrary, there is a kind of beauty in this exmajor digital platformsance, as if Fuseli had captured the very essence of Shakespeare’s dream—that moment when reason fades and anything becomes possible.

---

06The dark legacy: how Fuseli invented surrealism

When André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, he cited Fuseli as one of his precursors. This was no accident. The Surrealists saw in him the first artist to have systematically explored the unconscious. Dalí, in particular, was fascinated by The Nightmare. He found in it the idea that the dream was a territory to conquer, a parallel reality where the laws of physics no longer applied.

But Fuseli’s influence extends beyond painting. German Expressionist cinema, with its exaggerated shadows and warped sets, owes him much. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) directly borrows his aesthetic: pallid faces, clenched hands, a light that seems to come from nowhere. Later, Hitchcock drew inspiration from Lady Macbeth for the shower scene in Psycho—the idea that a familiar space can suddenly become a trap.

Yet Fuseli remains an artist little known to the general public. Perhaps because his work is too dark, too disturbing. He does not paint pretty landscapes or flattering portraits. He plunges into the darkest corners of the human soul and returns with images that continue to haunt us. As if, two centuries later, his nightmares had become our own.

---

07Why his canvases still watch us

Today, The Nightmare hangs in the Detroit Institute of Arts, behind bulletproof glass. Visitors stop before it, fascinated and uneasy. Some laugh, others look away. No one remains indifferent. This is the magic of Fuseli: his canvases do not merely demand to be looked at—they look back.

This impression comes from his unique way of representing space. In his work, the figures are never quite within the frame. They seem about to tip toward us, as if the canvas were a window open onto another world. Look at The Silence (1799): that veiled woman, a finger to her lips, before a half-open door. We do not know what lies behind that door, but we sense it is something terrible. It is this ambiguity that makes his works so powerful. They do not tell a story—they suggest a thousand.

Fuseli said that a good painting should “make one shiver.” His still do. Because they speak of universal fears: the fear of the night, the fear of desire, the fear of what lurks behind closed eyelids. In this, he is more than a painter of the Dark Romanticism. He is the first modern artist, the one who understood that art should not merely represent the world, but reveal its cracks.

So the next time you have a nightmare, remember Fuseli. Perhaps, after all, it was he who painted it.