Vampires in Art: 12 Paintings Before and After Dracula
Vampires in art arrived before Dracula. Munch painted a woman leaning into a man’s neck and insisted it was only a kiss, Burne Jones painted his own humiliation as a vampire tale, and Philip Burne Jones gave the world its first painted vampire in 1897, the same year as the novel.
Fangs, briefly
The most famous vampire painting was originally titled Love and Pain.
One 1897 vampire picture was painted by a man about the actress who left him.
Dracula was published in 1897 and the first vampire painting appeared the same year.
One Symbolist made the vampire a sphinx, a snake and a woman in the same decade.
And the oldest bloodsuckers here are medieval demons, painted long before anyone said vampire.
1 | Vampire, Edvard Munch (1895)
A red haired woman bends over a man’s bowed neck, her hair falling around him like blood. Munch called it Love and Pain and always denied the vampire reading.
His friend Stanislaw Przybyszewski renamed it, and the new title stuck for good. Munch painted at least six versions: Edvard Munch.
2 | The Vampire, Philip Burne Jones (1897)
A woman in white kneels over an unconscious man, painted the year Dracula was published. It is usually read as revenge art about the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell.
Rudyard Kipling, the painter’s cousin, wrote a poem to accompany it, and the phrase a rag and a bone and a hank of hair entered the language.
3 | The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli (1781)
The incubus squatting on a sleeping woman’s chest is the ancestor of every bedroom vampire scene painted since.
Fuseli built the whole visual grammar: the sleeper, the weight, the intruder nobody sees. More of it is in dreams in art.
4 | Lilith, John Collier (1887)
Adam’s first wife stands naked with an enormous snake coiled around her body, eyes closed, entirely at ease.
Victorian painters used Lilith to smuggle the vampire idea past the censors: seduction and death in one figure. John Collier made a career of it.
5 | The Kiss of the Sphinx, Franz von Stuck (1895)
A winged sphinx pins a man backward on a rock and kisses him with her whole body. Munich called it scandalous and bought it anyway.
Von Stuck painted the same predator repeatedly: sphinx, serpent, sin. He taught Kandinsky and Klee.
6 | The Vampire, Edvard Munch in the forest (1916 to 1918)
Munch moved the same two figures outdoors decades later, into a green wood, softer and stranger than the interior version.
One of these was stolen from the Munch Museum in 1988 and recovered. The theft history is in the most stolen paintings in history.
7 | The Blood of the Vampire and Symbolist women
Around 1900 the femme fatale absorbed the vampire entirely: Salome, Judith, Circe and Lilith all drain the men who look at them.
Klimt’s Judith with the head of Holofernes is the most elegant example. He is in my guide to Gustav Klimt.
8 | Medieval demons and the drinking of blood
Long before the word existed, manuscripts and church walls showed demons feeding on souls and corpses walking out of graves.
The revenant is a medieval European legal problem before it is a literary one. Hell’s full cast is in hell in painting.
9 | Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya (about 1823)
Not a vampire, but the most horrifying feeding in art: a father eating his own child, painted directly on Goya’s dining room wall.
He never intended anyone to see it. He is in my guide to Francisco Goya.
10 | The Vampire, Albert Joseph Penot (about 1890)
A naked woman with enormous bat wings hangs upside down against a black ground, painted in Paris for the Salon market.
It is pure spectacle, and it shows how fast the bat woman became a commercial genre in France.
11 | Vampire drawings of Zdzislaw Beksinski
The Polish painter of nightmares produced skeletal, wrapped and feeding figures for decades without ever naming them.
He refused titles entirely so viewers had to name their own horrors. He is in my guide to Zdzislaw Beksinski.
12 | Nosferatu and the painters who fed it (1922)
Murnau’s film borrowed its shadows and doorways from German painting and Symbolist prints, and gave every later vampire image its look.
The stolen Dracula rights forced the studio to change every name, and a court ordered the negatives destroyed. Copies survived.
For the Symbolist women who drank blood, browse the Met and the National Gallery.
Vampires on canvas, quick answers
What is the most famous vampire painting? Munch’s Vampire, which he himself called Love and Pain and refused to explain as a vampire.
Which came first, Dracula or vampire painting? They arrived together. Philip Burne Jones exhibited The Vampire in 1897, the year Stoker published Dracula.
Why so many vampire women around 1900? The femme fatale gave Symbolists a way to paint fear of women, desire and death in one figure.
Is Fuseli’s Nightmare a vampire painting? Not literally, but it invented the composition every later vampire scene reuses.
Where can I see these works? Oslo for Munch, Munich for von Stuck, the Prado for Goya, and Collier in British collections.
One closing fact: Munch sold versions of Vampire for decades because collectors kept asking for it, while insisting to the end that it showed nothing more than a woman kissing a man’s neck.