Henry Fuseli was a Swiss-born painter who made his career in London, born in Zurich in 1741 and dead in 1825. Trained as a Protestant minister, he turned to painting in his late twenties and became a professor at the Royal Academy. He is remembered for The Nightmare of 1781, a sleeping woman with a demon on her chest and a horse staring through a curtain, one of the most copied horror images in Western art.
It is still the picture Fuseli is known for, and a print of it once hung in Sigmund Freud's apartment in Vienna.
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By any measure, The Nightmare worked. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1782, it was Fuseli's first commercial success, and an engraving after it earned its publisher more than 500 pounds.
Turn the canvas around and the picture changes. On the back is a second painting, an unfinished portrait of a girl. Three years before the Academy show, Fuseli had written to his friend Johann Kaspar Lavater about a woman in Zurich: "Last night I had her in bed with me."
The woman was Lavater's niece, and her father had refused Fuseli's proposal of marriage. The question that follows is who is asleep under the demon.
What You'll Discover
Why a minister fled Zurich.
Who told him to paint.
Who the sleeper might be.
What hung on Freud's wall.
What Wollstonecraft asked of him.
What his biggest gamble cost him.