For four hundred years, painters have tried to give a body to the dead. They painted returning lovers, doubles in the woods, spirits raised from the grave, and figures crossing dark water. These twelve famous ghost paintings show how the returning dead were imagined across Western art.
A ghost is impossible to paint. It has no body, no weight, no fixed shape. That is exactly why the best painters could not resist it. Some are stories from the Bible or Shakespeare, some are private grief, a dead wife painted back into the room.
If these draw you in, you will also love 7 secrets hidden in famous paintings, Leonora Carrington, the woman they could not tame, and what a memento mori really means.
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1. Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare
In 1781, Henry Fuseli painted a sleeping woman flung back across a bed, an ape like incubus squatting on her chest while a pale eyed horse pushes through the curtain. It went on show at the Royal Academy in 1782.
The horse is a pun on the word nightmare, which never had anything to do with horses. On the back of the canvas Fuseli left a portrait of a young woman who had refused to marry him.
The image spread everywhere as a print and has been copied ever since. It hangs today at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and remains the picture people reach for when they describe a bad dream.
2. William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea
Around 1819 to 1820, William Blake told the astrologer John Varley that a ghost had visited him. It was the spirit of a flea. Blake drew what he claimed to see, then worked it up as this small panel in tempera and gold.
Blake said the flea spirit told him that fleas were inhabited by the souls of bloodthirsty men. The muscular creature carries a cup for drinking blood and steps between stage curtains, as if taking a bow.
The panel is barely 21 centimeters tall, painted on a tropical hardwood. It belongs to the Tate, one of the oddest things Blake ever made.
3. Salvator Rosa, The Shade of Samuel Appears to Saul
In 1668, Salvator Rosa painted the scene from the First Book of Samuel where King Saul, deserted by God, seeks out a witch at Endor. She raises the dead prophet Samuel, who rises wrapped in white.
The Bible tells the story as a warning against forbidden magic. Rosa fills the shadows with grotesque spirits and a wild haired sorceress, while the ghost tells the kneeling Saul that he will die the next day.
The canvas is nearly three meters wide. It entered the French royal collection and now hangs in the Louvre.
4. John Everett Millais, Speak! Speak!
In 1895, John Everett Millais showed a young Roman who has read the letters of his lost love all night. At dawn the bed curtains part and she stands before him in her bridal dress.
Is she alive or a ghost? Millais refused to say. When a friend pressed him, he answered, that is just what I want. The doubt was the whole point.
The nation bought it for two thousand pounds under the Chantrey Bequest that same year. It was among the last things Millais painted before his death in 1896.
5. Arnold Bocklin, Isle of the Dead
In 1880, Arnold Bocklin painted a small boat crossing still water toward an island of dark cypress and pale tombs. A figure in white stands upright beside a coffin. He finished this first version in Basel that May.
Bocklin never explained the scene and never gave it this title. A dealer supplied the name. A widow, Marie Berna, had asked him to add the coffin and the white figure, turning it into an image of her own grief.
Bocklin painted five versions between 1880 and 1886. Rachmaninoff saw a print and wrote his symphonic poem Isle of the Dead in 1908.
6. Ary Scheffer, The Ghosts of Paolo and Francesca
In 1835, Ary Scheffer painted the two lovers from Dante Inferno, Paolo and Francesca, drifting through the dark as pale entwined ghosts while Dante and Virgil look on from the shadows.
The couple were killed for their affair and damned to the second circle of hell, tossed forever on an infernal wind. Scheffer returned to the subject at least six times between 1822 and 1855.
The 1835 canvas is the finest of the group. It hangs in the Louvre, where the pale bodies still seem lit from within.
7. Gustave Moreau, The Apparition
Between 1874 and 1876, Gustave Moreau painted Salome frozen in mid dance. Before her floats the severed, haloed head of John the Baptist, dripping and staring straight at her.
The head is a vision only Salome can see. Moreau turned a Bible story into a hallucination, and the writer Joris Karl Huysmans made this watercolour a cult image in his 1884 novel Against Nature.
It is a watercolour, just over a meter tall. It lives at the Musee d Orsay in Paris.
8. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, How They Met Themselves
In 1864, Dante Gabriel Rossetti finished a watercolour of two lovers walking in a dark wood who suddenly meet their own doubles. The woman faints. Her double glows.
Rossetti called it his bogie drawing. In folklore, meeting your doppelganger was an omen of death. He had been drawing the idea since 1851.
He first painted a version on his honeymoon with Elizabeth Siddal. She died two years later. This 1864 watercolour is now at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
9. Theodore Chasseriau, Macbeth and the Ghost of Banquo
In 1854, Theodore Chasseriau painted the banquet scene from Macbeth, act three. Macbeth recoils in horror from an empty chair. Only he can see the blood soaked ghost of Banquo, the friend he ordered killed.
The guests see nothing, and that is the terror of the scene. Chasseriau sent it to the Salon of 1855, where it was rejected.
The city of Reims acquired the painting in 1939. It hangs today in its Musee des Beaux Arts.
10. Frank Dicksee, A Reverie
In 1895, Frank Dicksee painted an evening drawing room. A wife plays the piano. Her husband broods, and behind him a pale woman appears, the ghost of a love he lost years before.
The wife cannot see the apparition. Dicksee painted his own face on the husband and posed a model as the spectre. A reviewer that year called her an excellent ghost indeed.
The picture illustrates a line of verse, lips that are dead sang me that song. It hangs at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
11. Caspar David Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oakwood
Between 1809 and 1810, Caspar David Friedrich painted a line of monks carrying a coffin through snow toward a ruined church, lit only by two candles. Bare oaks claw at a cold sky.
Friedrich based the ruin on the real Eldena Abbey. The monks move like shades, and a fresh grave gapes in the foreground, so the whole picture becomes a slow procession toward death.
King Frederick William III of Prussia bought it straight from the 1810 exhibition. It hangs in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, still paired with The Monk by the Sea.
12. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix
Between 1864 and 1870, Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted Beatrice from Dante poem at the instant of her death, eyes closed, a red dove dropping a poppy into her open hands.
The face is Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti wife, who died in 1862 from a laudanum overdose. The poppy points straight at how she died. He painted her as a spirit slipping out of the living world.
Rossetti made several versions. The first, begun as a memorial, hangs at Tate Britain in London.
Where to stand in front of the ghosts pictures
Tate, London: Blake The Ghost of a Flea, Millais Speak! Speak! and Rossetti Beata Beatrix.
Louvre, Paris: Rosa The Shade of Samuel Appears to Saul and Scheffer The Ghosts of Paolo and Francesca.
Musee d Orsay, Paris: Moreau The Apparition.
Detroit Institute of Arts: Fuseli The Nightmare.
Kunstmuseum Basel: Bocklin Isle of the Dead.
Why painters kept summoning the dead
Many of these belong to Romanticism and to Symbolism, movements drawn to dreams, death, and the unseen.
Others are history paintings of ghost scenes from the Bible and Shakespeare, staged with all the drama of the theatre.
Ghosts in art, questions people ask
What is the most famous ghost painting? Fuseli The Nightmare from 1781 is the best known, though it shows a demon rather than a returning spirit. For an actual ghost, Millais Speak! Speak! is the clearest.
Why did artists paint so many ghosts in the 1800s? The nineteenth century saw a boom in spiritualism, seances and ghost stories, which painters like Rossetti and Millais turned into images of doubles and returning loves.
What is Bocklin Isle of the Dead about? Bocklin never said. He painted five versions from 1880 and let a dealer supply the title. A grieving widow asked him to add the coffin and the white figure.
Is the woman in Speak! Speak! a ghost? Millais left it deliberately unclear. She may be a living bride or a spirit at dawn. He said the doubt was exactly what he wanted.
Where is The Nightmare today? Tate in London holds Blake, Millais and Rossetti. The Louvre has Rosa and Scheffer, and the Musee d Orsay has Moreau The Apparition.
Do painters ever haunt a building instead of a ghost? Regularly, and Friedrich's ruined abbey above is one version of it. A piece on haunted houses in painting tracks the theme from Hopper's house by the railroad onward, and the empty window that does most of the work.
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Why a good ghost never wants to leave
Notice how often these painters could not stop. Bocklin painted five Isles of the Dead. Scheffer painted his Paolo and Francesca at least six times between 1822 and 1855. Rossetti went back to his dead wife again and again. Once a painter conjures a spirit onto canvas, it seems, the spirit is very hard to send away.
The Nightmare gets called the most famous ghost painting on lists like this one, but it is not a ghost. It is a demon and a pun on the word nightmare. An actual returning spirit, the kind that used to sit at someone's table, comes through better in quieter pictures like Rossetti's doubles or Millais's bride.
Millais's Speak! Speak! is the strongest picture here and the most underrated. Refusing to say whether the woman is alive or dead is not a cop out, it is the only honest way to paint a ghost, since nobody who claims to have actually seen one is ever fully sure either.
Bocklin's five versions of the same island say something more interesting than any single one of them: he never had one true idea, he had a marketable mood, and he kept selling it. That is not a knock on the picture, just on the myth that symbolist painters were each chasing one unrepeatable vision.
Two more haunted corners of the site continue this one: the sleep that turns violent in Nightmares in Painting, and the wider unease traced in Creepy Paintings. Both sit inside a larger guide to art history's darkest paintings.