![]() ![]() Even Thomas De Quincy – author of the famous Diary of an English Opium Eater – fell for it and later wrote: “…we hear it reported of Dryden and Fuseli in modern times, that they thought proper to eat raw meat for the sake of obtaining splendid dreams: how much better for such a purpose to have eaten opium.”Įating raw or abundant amounts of meat before going to bed seems to have been a short rage among creatives who had read the Public Adviser, but Fuseli himself probably never sinned in it. From 1790 on-wards, a myth, as peculiar as it is persistent, arose around the painting through a nonsense publication in the Public Adviser about the source of Fuseli’s creativity.īefore going to bed, Fuseli would eat raw pork to evoke fierce dreams in himself. The work was immediately copied by other artists and even by cartoonists of the time, who used the work to create a caricature of their political nightmares. With the Nightmare or Incubus, the Swiss-English painter Henry Fuseli hit the bull’s-eye. The WILL presides not in the realm of SLEEP In vain she wills to run, fly, swim, walk, creep In vain to scream with quivering lips she tries,Īnd strain in palsy’d lids her tremulous eyes ![]() ![]() Start in her hands, and struggle in her feet ‘O’er her fair limbs convulsive tremors fleet “The Nightmare” or “Incubus” in the 1781 version by Henry Fuseli ![]()
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