Formal Analysis: Fuseli’s Nightmare depicts a young woman in a sinuous white dress stretched across a simple bed asleep. Her body from the shoulders up gracefully hangs loose at the end of the bed, her left hand resting on the floor. Her face is not quite upset, but in an unsettled and dreaming state. The way her head lies, leaving her neck fully exposed, she is completely vulnerable. On the woman’s stomach sits a disturbing and rotund gargoyle-like creature, staring dangerously at his audience. Peering from behind a deep red drape is a strange blind black horse with a wild, wispy, mane and vacant, haunting, white eyes. There are three distinct figures in this piece, but your initial glance is almost balanced between the harsh white figure and the unsettling creature that haunts her stomach. The woman’s bright white body separates two deep red fabrics that naturally adorn what could be blank space. The light yellow fabric that lies beneath the woman is a balance to the creature’s pale brown and stone-like coloring on the other side.
Narrative Analysis: The way that the woman lays, it is obvious she has become distorted in her sleep. The horse and creature on her stomach are figments of her imagination, possibly what she dreams of. Being asleep and sprawled out so honestly, the woman is completely defenseless to the demon sitting directly on her womb, which may symbolize anxieties with infertility. The wild horse (nightmare) was irrelevant to me at first sight, but besides the feeling of balance he gives to the composition of the piece, he gives the scene an unreal sense, which ultimately gives us the impression that it is a dream. The Nightmare is said to be one of the first surrealist paintings, perceiving an image of what happens inside the mind. Being a “precursor” into surrealism, it was most definitely part of the Romanticism movement. It is said that Fuseli paved the way for many artists to follow (Goya) by being the first to reveal the human subconscious.
