| The Nightmare has long stood as the pre-eminent masterpiece of fantastic
painting. Created in 1781, on the threshold of the era when The Fantastic
itself emerged as a specific genre, The Nightmare enjoyed a huge success
among a British generation already hungry for the strong sensations of
Gothic literature. It was reproduced again and again in engravings and
popular prints over an entire generation. The erotic charge of the painting,
its association of the demonic, the sexual and the oneiric, and its brazen
acknowledgment of voyeuristic pleasure would become the grist for the mill
of psychoanalysis.
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Nightmare |
Nightmare II |
