Explore the Exhibition of this artwork.
The painting is housed at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It was first shown at the Royal Academy of London in 1782, where it "excited ... an uncommon degree of interest", according to Fuseli's early biographer and friend John Knowles.
It remained well-known decades later, and Fuseli painted other versions on the same theme. Fuseli sold the original for twenty guineas, and an inexpensive engraving by Thomas Burke circulated widely beginning in January 1783, earning publisher John Raphael Smith more than 500 pounds. The engraving was underscored by a short poem by Erasmus Darwin, "Night-Mare":
 So on his Nightmare through the evening fogFlits the squab Fiend o'er fen, and lake, and bog;Seeks some love-wilder'd maid with sleep oppress'd,Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.
Darwin included these lines and expanded upon them in his long poem The Loves of the Plants (1789), for which Fuseli provided the frontispiece: —Such as of late amid the murky skyWas mark'd by Fuseli's poetic eye;Whose daring tints, with Shakspeare's happiest grace,Gave to the airy phantom form and place.—Back o'er her pillow sinks her blushing head,Her snow-white limbs hang helpless from the bed;Her interrupted heart-pulse swims in death.O'er her fair limbs convulsive tremors fleet,
Start in her hands, and struggle in her feet;
In vain to scream with quivering lips she tries,
And strains in palsy'd lids her tremulous eyes;
In vain she wills to run, fly, swim, walk, creep;
The Will presides not in the bower of Sleep.
—On her fair bosom sits the Demon-Ape
Erect, and balances his bloated shape;
Rolls in their marble orbs his Gorgon-eyes,
And drinks with leathern ears her tender cries.
mare frontispiece Thomas Burke Erasmus Darwin Royal Academy of London John Knowles pound The Loves of the Plants guinea Detroit Institute of Arts engraving Nightmare