Fear is one of the hardest feelings to paint. It lasts a second and runs through the whole body, yet the painter must hold it still. Most artists reduce it to a few signs we read at once: wide eyes, an open mouth, a body pulling away.
This list follows twelve paintings in which fear is the real subject. Each entry asks two questions: where the painter put the fear, and what set it off.
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How These Were Chosen
A picture of fear made the cut on one of three grounds. The fear shows on a face or in a body, human or animal, not just in the story. Or the sources tell us how the painter built it, through a drawing, a model, a text or a witness of the time. Or the picture changed how later artists painted fear.
12. William Hogarth, David Garrick as Richard III (about 1745)
A king starts up from sleep inside his tent, one arm raised and his face caught in shock. The English painter William Hogarth painted the scene around 1745. The man playing the king is the actor David Garrick.
David Garrick had become the talk of London four years earlier. On October 19, 1741, he played Richard III at a theater called Goodman's Fields.
His natural style broke with the slow declamation then in fashion, and it made his name almost at once.
The moment comes from the night before the Battle of Bosworth, in 1485. In his sleep, Richard has seen the ghosts of the people he had murdered on his way to the throne.
He wakes in terror, and this is the instant Hogarth chose.
The words Garrick spoke were not quite Shakespeare's. They came from an adaptation by the actor and writer Colley Cibber, which held the stage for nearly two centuries.
So the fear in the picture belongs to a character, and it is performed by an actor who had made the role his own.
Everything hangs on the raised hand. Hogarth paints fear the way an actor plays it, large enough to be read from the back of a theater.
Hogarth was paid 200 pounds for the canvas. He later wrote that no English artist had ever received more for a single portrait.
The art historian Gill Perry concludes that Hogarth helped to establish a new kind of portrait, the theatrical portrait. It sits between portraiture and history painting.
At a Glance
Artist: William Hogarth (1697 to 1764)
Painted: About 1745
Medium: Oil on canvas
Where to see it: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
About This Painting
Is the scene from Shakespeare's Richard III?
Only in part. Garrick performed Colley Cibber's version, which cut and rearranged the play and added lines of Cibber's own, such as "Off with his head! So much for Buckingham!"
How big is David Garrick as Richard III?
Hogarth's canvas measures 190.5 by 250.8 centimeters, about 75 by 99 inches. Its Walker number is WAG 634.
When did the Walker Art Gallery acquire it?
The Walker Art Gallery bought it in 1956, with help from the National Art Collections Fund.
Did other painters show Garrick in the same role?
Yes. Nathaniel Dance-Holland painted Garrick as Richard III at Bosworth in 1771.
11. Francisco de Goya, A Scene from The Forcibly Bewitched (1798)
A priest in black pours oil into a lamp, one hand clapped to his mouth and his eyes staring. The lamp has the form of a ram, almost life-size, looming out of the dark.
Francisco de Goya painted this small canvas in 1798, for a duke and duchess in Madrid.