The Night Mare

About this artwork

**The Night Mare (1782)** is a striking stipple engraving in brown ink, measuring 8 15/16 × 9 5/8 inches, created by engravers Laure and Lenoir after the visionary artist Henry Fuseli. Housed in the Metropolitan Museum Art's Drawings and Prints as part of the Elisha Whitt Collection, it depicts a sleeping woman gripped by fear, accompanied by mythical creatures and a ghostly horse—hallmarks of nightmare folklore that blend the erotic, supernatural, and psychological. Fuseli, a Swiss painter who thrived in late 18th-century London, pioneered Romanticism's fascination with the irrational and sublime. His original oil painting *The Nightmare* (ca. 1781) shocked Royal Academy viewers with its raw intensity, drawing from Germanic legends of the "night-mare" (a spirit causing nocturnal terror). This print reproduction popularized the image amid growing interest in the subconscious and Gothic themes. Stipple engraving's dotted technique masterfully renders soft, atmospheric shading in brown ink, evoking the hazy dread of a bad dream while making Fuseli's bold vision widely accessible. A cultural touchstone, it influenced literature like Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein* and endures as a symbol of vulnerability and the uncanny.