The nightmare: Henry Fuseli

The nightmare:

The nightmare likely influenced Mary Shelley in a scene from her famous Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). Shelley would have been familiar with the painting; her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, knew Fuseli.

The nightmare has no moralizing subject. The scene is a product of Fuseli’s imagination. It has a literary character and the various figures demonstrate Fuseli’s broad knowledge…