The Vision of Catherine of Aragon

Henry Fuseli was a Swiss-born painter who settled in London and made his name staging the eerie and the supernatural, just as English taste was turning toward Gothic dread. He exhibited this at the Royal Academy in 1781. It takes a moment from Shakespeare's Henry VIII, the discarded queen Catherine of Aragon, cast off so the king could marry Anne Boleyn, lying near death and dreaming. In the dream, pale spirits descend holding out a garland toward her, and Fuseli catches her raising an arm to it while her lady-in-waiting recoils in alarm. He put the figures in loose classical drapery and left out the masks and palm branches the play describes, keeping only the reaching hands and the glow. It was painted for a private patron, Sir Robert Smith, nearly a decade before the great Shakespeare picture galleries made this kind of scene a national fashion.