The Nightmare

A young woman in white sprawls back across her bed, arms flung over the edge in deep sleep, while a squat, leering incubus crouches heavily on her chest and a wild-eyed horse thrusts its head through the curtains behind. Henry Fuseli's Nightmare gives visible, grotesque form to a bad dream and its suffocating dread, mixing eroticism, terror, and the supernatural. Now in Detroit, it became an instant sensation and an enduring icon of Gothic Romanticism - the unconscious, the irrational, and the erotic dragged shockingly into view.