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Provenance: Kurt Meissner (bears his collector's mark)
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Exhibited: Bremen, Kunsthalle and Zurich, Kunsthaus, Handzeichnungen Alter Meister aus Schweizer Privatbesitz, 1976, no. 291;
New York, C. G. Boerner, 400 Years of Swiss Drawing, The Kurt Meissner Collection, 2001, no. 9
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Literature: Gert Schiff, Johann Heinrich Füssli, Zurich/Munich 1973, p. 613, no. 1568.
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Notes: Füssli's painting, The Nightmare, was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1781 and became instantly famous. He was asked to repeat the subject at least four times in the following decades. Schiff, on the basis of Füssli's shakey inscription on the verso and of the first appearance of William Linton as an exhibitor at the Royal Academy in 1817, dates this drawing 1817-25 and associates it with the last painted version of the subject (1810-20). David Weinglass, in a letter of March 1999, suggests an earlier date of 1810-14. On the other hand, as suggested in the Boerner exhibition catalogue, the position of the female figure remains the same in all versions of the painting, and as this sketch is so immediate and free and shows Füssli working out the position of the arm, it seems possible that it is a first idea for the composition and that the inscription on the verso was added later.
Schiff believes the inscription on the recto is in the hand of the Countess of Guilford, who was born Susan Coutts and was a patron of Füssli. John Knowles was his first biographer, publishing The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Esq. in 1831.
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