A sleeping woman lies flung backwards across a bed while a squat, ape-like incubus crouches on her chest and a horse with pupil-less eyes pushes through the red curtains. Fuseli, a Swiss painter working in London, showed it at the Royal Academy in 1782, where its open eroticism shocked critics and made his name. Engravings soon spread it across Europe.
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The horse is a visual pun on the word "nightmare". A preliminary chalk sketch has no horse, so Fuseli may have added it late.
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