Creator of Nightmares: Henry Fuseli’s Art and Life, Christopher Baker, Reaktion, £30

Sigmund Freud’s old waiting room in Vienna was crammed with weird and eccentric things. Even years later, his patients could still remember their bemusement. There were prints of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, all gristle and bone; Jusepe de Ribera’s Clubfooted Boy, with his strange, unsettling grin; even a handful of rococo fantasies. But what seems to have alarmed Freud’s patients most was Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781).

Everything about it is unsettling. A sleeping woman lies draped across a bed, her head dangling limply over the end. On her chest squats a hideous incubus, while in the background, a ghostly horse, with wild, blind eyes, bursts out from behind a curtain. It is strange, even hallucinatory – but terrifyingly familiar. It conjures up all the dark horrors of sleep, the nameless spectres of the unconscious – everything, in short, that lurks in the hidden corners of our psyche. Which is precisely why Freud chose it.

He wasn’t alone. Since The Nightmare was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782, it has been copied, imitated, and plagiarised so many times that it has become part of our shared visual imagination – a shorthand for everything that is terrifying and unknown. It inspired Elizabeth’s death in Frankenstein (1818) and Madeleine’s trances in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839). It’s there in Eric Rohmer’s film La Marquise d’O… (1976). It’s even featured in the posters for Doja Cat’s Scarlet Tour (2023-4).

By comparison, Fuseli himself seems almost invisible. Although almost everyone knows The Nightmare at some level, I doubt many of us could remember his name – let alone say much about his life and career. And no surprise. Despite a recent exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, his other works are rarely given much space in galleries; and, other than a few fusty monographs, he has been almost completely overlooked by biographers.

To call this unfair would be an understatement. Fuseli was anything but a weird, one-hit-wonder. Quite the opposite. As Christopher Baker argues in this elegant, crisply written book, he deserves to be recognised as ‘one of the most provocative, inventive, and fascinating artists of the late eighteenth century’.

Other than Byron, there were few people as ‘Romantic’ – or as wild. Born in Zurich in the early months of 1741, Fuseli (or Füssli, as he was then known) was the son of a well-known, if unremarkable, landscape painter. Neither he nor his family ever dreamt that he would become an artist, though. Initially, he had his heart set on the Church. At the age of 20 he was ordained a Zwinglian minister and seemed destined for a life of stolid convention. But his character was far too turbulent, too violent, ever to be restrained by a cassock. After writing an ill-tempered pamphlet denouncing the corruption of a local magistrate, he was forced to leave the country.

Wandering around Europe, in search of another means of earning his crust, he first thought of becoming a writer. He made his way first to Paris – where he met David Hume – and then London, where he published a volume of thoughts on Rousseau. Only when this flopped did he decide to try his luck as an artist. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, though. Thanks, no doubt, to his father, he had some talent; but he could just as easily have chosen the theatre, instead. A few kind words from Joshua Reynolds, praising some of his drawings, were all it took to convince him to devote his life to art.

Unsurprisingly, Fuseli’s early efforts were faltering. Despite a trip to Rome, which fired his admiration for Dante and Michelangelo, he struggled to find his artistic ‘voice’.  Those works which he managed to exhibit at the Royal Academy – including The Nightmare – were recognised as containing the seeds of genius but savaged for their ‘inaccuracy’ and unpleasantness.

Only when John Boydell – the publisher and future Lord Mayor of London – commissioned him to paint a series of illustrations for his newly-established Shakespeare Gallery, did Fuseli find his opening. From that moment on, his rise was sure, if not rapid. By 1790, he was a Fellow of the Royal Academy and could boast a certain reputation for the dramatic. Despite a poorly received series of works inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost, he rose to become the academy’s professor of painting, and then keeper. He died admired, if not necessarily loved, in 1825.

Fuesli was a strange, often difficult, man. Although he spent much of his life in London, he never managed to shake off his Swiss-German ways. He was famous for his brusqueness, often bordering on rudeness. Indeed, there is often something of the club boor about him: all too often, we find him loudly proclaiming his opinions across the table, scarcely listening to what anyone else had to say, yet quick to anger at the faintest criticism. Not to say that he couldn’t be charming. You don’t rise to become Keeper of the Royal Academy without being at least a little bit personable, after all. He was evidently popular. And he had his fair share of female admirers, too. Mary Woolstencroft, no less, fell deeply, even obsessively, in love with him. She hounded him so persistently that, in the end, she had to be asked to stop.

As with Fuseli’s life, so it is with his art. No one could pretend there is much charm in his works. He was a forceful, aggressive artist, for whom darkness was always a more congenial medium than light. As contemporary critics often noted, his figures were often stilted, his compositions cumbersome. This was, to some extent, deliberate. As Baker is keen to stress, what makes pieces like The Nightmare so effective is that they trade in the bizarre, they leave strange, unfamiliar shapes in their ‘unnatural’ form, rather than trying to shoe-horn them back into everyday life.

Precisely for this reason, Fuseli was always at his best in hellish worlds or lost in dreams of sorcery. The Weird Sisters (1783) – arguably his best-known work after The Nightmare – deploys his lumpen style to brilliant effect, bringing out the eery unreality of the witches even as it plays on a certain naturalism. So, too, The Head of a Damned Soul (1770-78), though barely more than a sketch, is filled with twisted pain; while Dante and Virgil on the Ice of Lake Cocytus (1774) perfectly evokes the massive horrors of the Inferno.

Now and then, Fuseli even used this to heighten sexual undertones in unexpected ways. Take Brunhilde Observing Gunther, Whom She Has Tied to the Ceiling (1807) – which Baker analyses with brilliant concision. Tied hands and feet, Gunther is deliciously vulnerable to the voluptuously creamy Brunhilde, watching him coquettishly from the marriage bed behind. It’s hard to think of a more provocative depiction of the scene. The imagination – and the pulse – races.

But at times, it’s hard to decide if Fuseli was adapting his style to the demands of his chosen subjects or had just found a convenient niche in which to hide his defects. When he turned his hand to more conventional historical themes, the results could be alarming – and not in a good way. Milton Dictating to His Daughter (1794) is a complete misfire. Looming heavily in his chair, the blind, ashen poet seems not so much lost in a distant reverie as a malformed cadaver, bemused by the girl scribbling away at his side. But even when Fuseli was on home turf, as it were, his heavy figures sometimes ruin the scene. The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches (1796) is a good example. Baker gamely – and perhaps rightly – emphasises its originality; but still, it is so unbalanced as to be almost unhinged.

Baker’s account is superbly well-informed. He has made excellent use of his materials and is sensitive to the many ambiguities of Fuseli’s life. That said, the narrative does feel a little sparse at times. Baker is often reluctant to venture into speculation, much less answer the questions which leap off the page so tantalisingly. How far was Fuseli’s appetite for the fantastic informed by his Zwinglian faith, for example? Did Zwingli’s conception of sin as an hereditary corruption of human nature lurk behind his depiction of those horrible creatures Fuseli conjured up? It would be fascinating to know – or at least to have some sense of what the answer might be.

Perhaps Baker is right to be coy, though. Biography is a dangerous game. When you try to reconstruct someone’s life, you are always caught in the abyss between what you know and what you’d like to know. You can try to bridge the gap with speculation, but there’s always a risk of losing your foothold in the evidence and projecting yourself onto your subject as you fall. Sometimes, the emptiness can be more eloquent. In a sense, lives take place not in the words and images that are left behind, but in the silences between them. They lie, in short, in the reader’s imagination. And in Fuseli’s case, that’s no small thing. He was, after all, an artist who traded in the unconscious, the weird, and the fantastical. What could be better than for a biographer to let us conjure him up in imagination anew?