Painting the inside of the head
One whole side of the temperament went looking inward, into dream, nightmare, and vision, and it got there earliest of all. The new great subject was not always a mountain or a battlefield. Sometimes it was the irrational mind itself, the things that come loose when the daylight world lets go. Two painters working in Britain mapped that inner country a generation before Goya, Delacroix, or Turner made a mark, and they could hardly have been less alike: a Swiss showman who staged horror like theatre, and an English visionary who saw God and argued with him.
A demon on the sleeper's chest
Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) was Swiss-born (christened Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zurich) and spent his career in London, where he rose to Keeper of the Royal Academy, the institution that ran the official art world. (That same Academy had admitted only two women among its thirty-four founders in 1768 and would elect no other woman as a full member for more than a century and a half, the closed door most women painters of this generation worked behind.) Fuseli painted the supernatural, the erotic, and the uncanny, and his one unforgettable picture is The Nightmare of 1781.
A woman in white lies thrown back across a bed, deep asleep, her arms hanging to the floor. On her chest crouches a small dark incubus (a demon folklore said pressed down on sleepers in the night), squatting and staring straight out at the viewer. Behind, through a gap in the curtains, a horse’s head pushes in with blank, glowing eyes, half a pun on the word night-mare and half pure dread. Nothing is explained. The picture simply hands you the feeling of a bad dream as a thing with weight, sitting on a sleeping body. It was painted in 1781, about eighteen years before Goya pulled the first proof of his Caprichos, which means the nightmare strand of Romanticism was already circulating in London while the Enlightenment was still in full confidence.
The figure with the compass
William Blake (1757–1827) was a poet, painter, and printmaker who lived nearly unknown, made his own mythology, and invented his own way of printing it. He etched a design in relief on a copper plate, printed it in color, then hand-tinted every single copy with watercolor, so no two are quite the same. The Ancient of Days (1794) was the frontispiece to one of his prophetic books, and it is tiny, only about nine inches tall, with the force of something enormous.
A crouching figure leans out of a circle of fierce light into the dark and reaches down with a pair of compasses (the drawing tool, two hinged legs for scribing a circle), opening them over the void below. Most viewers read him as God measuring out creation. Blake meant something stranger: the figure is Urizen, his own invented god of cold reason and limits, and the act of measuring is not praised here but distrusted, reason caging the infinite. Either way the image burns. Blake was, as the story goes, hand-coloring a copy of this very plate in the days before he died in 1827, singing, a fitting exit for a man who spent his life painting what he saw with the inner eye and trusted that sight over the visible world.