Oral anglais

The Swiss-English painter Henry Fuseli (born Johann Heinrich Füssli) chose to depict
dark, irrational forces in his famous painting The Nightmare. In Fuseli’s startling
composition, a woman bathed in white light stretches across a bed, her arms, neck,
and head hanging off the end of the mattress. An apelike figure crouches on her
chest while a horse with glowing eyes and flared nostrils emerges from the shadowy
background.

The scene is an invented one, a product of Fuseli’s imagination, The painting has
yielded many interpretations and is seen as prefiguring late nineteenth-century
psychoanalytic theories regarding dreams and the unconscious. The figure that sits
upon the woman’s chest is often described as an imp or an incubus, a type of spirit
said to lie atop people in their sleep or even to have sexual intercourse with sleeping
women.

Despite the fact that it is tempting to understand the painting’s title as a punning,
double meaning, reference to the horse, the word “nightmare” does not refer to
horses. Rather, in the now obsolete definition of the term, a mare is an evil spirit that
tortures humans while they sleep.