JOHN HENRY FUSELI-THE NIGHTMARE

Grotesque,gotic,gost,it is a 1781 oil painting,wrist,a flask,Royal Academy of London ,laying on the bed,inconscious,sexuality, mare, with her head hanging down, exposing her long neck.She is surmounted by an incubus that peers out at the viewer. The interior is contemporary and fashionable, and contains a small table on which rests a mirror, phial, and a book,   The Nightmare likely influenced Mary Shelley in a scene from her famous Gothic novel Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus(1818). Shelley would have been familiar with the painting; her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, knew Fuseli. The iconic imagery associated with the Creature's murder of the protagonist Victor's wife seems to draw from the canvas: "She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by hair." The novel and Fuseli's biography share a parallel theme: just as Fuseli's incubus is infused with the artist's emotions in seeing Landholdt marry another man, Shelley's monster promises to get revenge on Victor on the night of his wedding. Like Frankenstein's monster, Fuseli's demon symbolically seeks to forestall a marriage.