Henry Fuseli

In 1781 Henry Fuseli exhibited a picture that people could not stop talking about. The Nightmare shows a woman flung back asleep across a bed while a squat demon, an incubus, crouches on her chest and a wild-eyed horse pushes its head through the curtains behind. It was one of the first paintings to go looking for the horror and desire of the sleeping mind, and prints of it hung everywhere.

Fuseli was Swiss by birth, born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zurich in 1741, and trained first as a clergyman before art and England claimed him. He steeped himself in Milton and Shakespeare and painted their most extreme moments, witches, fairies and damned spirits, with muscular, theatrical figures twisting out of deep shadow.

For all the wildness on his canvases he became an establishment figure, a professor at the Royal Academy in London who taught and championed the young. He was a friend of the poet and artist William Blake, and shared his taste for visionary subjects. He died in 1825 and was buried in St Paul's Cathedral, among the respectable painters his strangest work had unsettled.