The Dream of Belinda

The Dream of Belinda[1]
ArtistHenry Fuseli
Year1780–1790[2]
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions100 cm × 126 cm (39.5 in × 49.5 in)
LocationVancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver
Accession34.12[3]

The Dream of Belinda is a 1780s oil painting by Swiss artist Henry Fuseli after The Rape of the Lock. According to scholar Robert Halsband, this "brilliant" work is no illustration, rather an imaginative fusion of elements and themes from the poem with "symbols from Fuseli's own world of dreams and fantasy".[2]: 50 

Background

In his artworks and his writings, and perhaps in part due to the influence of compatriot Johann Jakob Bodmer,[3]: 226  Fuseli drew inspiration time and again from the classics of world literature, including Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Nibelungenlied.[2]: 44  This outpouring included nine paintings for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and forty-seven for his own Milton Gallery.[2]: 44  Private correspondence shows a less enthusiastic attitude towards 18th-century English poetry, with Pope's "metrical and rimed prose", "dull monotony of ear", and "drowsy psalmody" singled out by the artist for particular criticism.[2]: 44 [3]: 226  But there was an exception: "Pope never shewed poetic genius but once, and that, in 'The Rape of the Lock'".[3]: 226 [4]: I.359 

During the course of his career and as an illustrator, Fuseli would contribute designs for editions of Smollett's Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1769), Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden (1789–91), Gray's Poems (1800), Milton's Paradise Lost (1802), Thomson's Seasons (1802), and Cowper's Poems (1806).[2]: 44  Amongst these, the Gray, Milton, and Thomson illustrations were for the publisher Francis Isaac Du Roveray who, in 1798, wrote to Fuseli for a drawing of "The Cave of Spleen" for his forthcoming edition of The Rape of the Lock.[2]: 45  Shortly after publication the following January, engraved by Thomas Holloway,[5] Fuseli's now lost oil sketch was exhibited at the Royal Academy; the exhibition catalogue includes ten lines from the poem.[note 1][2]: 48  Printed to accompany Canto IV, the subject matter is perforce limited to that chapter; Fuseli's large-scale painting of the previous decade drew instead from the whole poem.[2]: 50  Following the example set in this work in departing further from the text—indeed going "far beyond Pope's poem"[2]: 53 —his students and disciples, among them Theodor von Holst and Lady Georgina North, went on to produce a succession of works based on The Rape of the Lock in which, "endowed with fecund imaginations and facile pencils they caught the spirit of the mock-epic far more sympathetically than the literal illustrators".[6]: 63 [7]: 92 

History

In an article in the art journal Pantheon, pairing The Dream with The Nightmare, Harold D. Kalman dates the painting to the early 1780s, noting similarities between the two in subject matter, style, and size—The Dream of Belinda is half an inch smaller in both height and width, having been trimmed in an earlier restoration.[3]: 236  Observing that around this time Fuseli was on friendly terms with one William Lock, Kalman tentatively suggests the commission as his.[3]: 234  The very dark corner areas, painted black,[3]: 236  may suggest the original frame had spandrels.[8]: 40 

Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1814,[1]: 21  and rumoured to have once belonged to the Marquess of Cholmondeley, the work was acquired with the assistance of the Founders Fund by Vancouver Art Gallery in 1934 from Sir Charles Holmes,[8]: 40  with nothing further being known about its provenance.[3]: 236  At the time of its acquisition, the painting went by the name Queen Mab, based on a former understanding of its subject;[3]: 232  more recently, in his 1973 catalogue raisonné Fuseli scholar Gert Schiff gave it the title Belindas Erwachen ("Belinda's Awakening"),[9] while Peter Tomory treats it as a variant on The Cave of Spleen.[2]: 50  The painting was exhibited at Portland Art Museum in 1967–8, the University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery in 1973, Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1974–5, the Tate Gallery and Musée du Petit Palais in 1975, Simon Fraser Art Gallery, Burnaby in 1981, and Art Gallery of Ontario in 1998.[1]: 21 

Description

"One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams", Fuseli once posited, though perhaps neither here nor in his oeuvre more generally.[2]: 50  As in another of his curtained scenes, a drawing of a subject from Milton's L'Allegro now in Auckland, there are four main figures—the slumbering Belinda, her guardian sylph Ariel, the gnome Umbriel, and, on the ground beneath a sheet, the covetous Baron.[3]: 226–8  In his introduction to The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope gives an explanation of the Rosicrucians, whereby the four elements are inhabited by four spirits, namely Sylphs, Gnomes, Nymphs, and Salamanders—corresponding respectively to air, earth, water, and fire; completing the quartet is Belinda as nymph[note 2] and the impassioned Baron as fire-Salamander.[note 3][3]: 228 

The pose of the main figure,[2]: 50  the recumbent[note 4] Belinda, is not unlike that of Michelangelo's Night, sketched by Fuseli in 1777,[2]: 50  and perhaps even closer to the Sleeping Ariadne.[3]: 228  Pink of cheek[note 5] with a crucifix round her neck,[note 6] the bright curtain[note 7] draws the eye to the area of her "vulnerable locks".[3]: 226  Above her and descending to her well-populated boudoir, the position of her guardian sylph Ariel[note 8]—a named borrowed by Pope from The Tempest—is that of several of Fuseli's earlier representations of Shakespeare's Ariel, the earliest dating to 1774,[2]: 51  and also close to his Shepherd's Dream, based on Paradise Lost.[3]: 226, 231 [10] The "ambisexual"[note 9] Ariel presents her charge with a dressing table, the "compositional fulcrum" round which the four main figures rotate, on which lies, projecting forth over the edge,[2]: 51  the letter inviting her to Hampton Court[8]: 39  Belinda sees immediately upon awakening.[note 10][3]: 226–7 [11] Also on the table for her toilette[note 11] are a crystal casket topped by a tiny owl, two earthenware containers for cosmetics, and a mirror, perhaps tokens of the vanity the ravishing of her lock affronts;[2]: 51  the apparent crack in the mirror and the delicate vessels may refer to the fragility of her virtue,[note 12] victim of an incubus.[3]: 234 

Foreshadowing the misfortune that is to befall her, crouched waiting at Belinda's feet, beneath a sheet upon which two moths[2]: 53  or butterflies copulate, is the ignoble Baron, ready to spring forth and rape her lock.[note 13][3]: 227–8  Further into the future, harbinger of the spleen that is to overtake her, the "sullen psychosomatic condition resulting from her tonsorial rape",[12] is the careering gnome Umbriel, hurrying though the scene with a backwards gesture[note 14] on his descent to the Cave of Spleen,[note 15][3]: 227  known in the eighteenth century as the "English malady".[13]: 165  A parody katabasis (descent into the underworld), Umbriel grasps in his hand a branch of spleenwort,[note 16] counterpart to Aeneas' celebrated golden bough on his descent in the sixth book of the Aeneid.[2]: 51 [14]: 294  Umbriel's head is garlanded—or strewn—with arrow-shaped leaves, like those of the fern-like spleenwort.[2]: 51  Paintings by Fuseli of Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream are similar in body-type, facial expression, and attitude.[2]: 51 

Completing the cast are a swooping figure with arms outstretched, almost identical to a figure in Fuseli's mid-1780s Cobweb (after the fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream), perhaps another mischievous gnome or sprite; just above, and scarcely visible, a dancing woman in a broad hat; and, at Umbriel's feet, two diminutive female figures, one smiling, one scowling, representing in turn the benevolent and malevolent aspects of Queen Mab from Romeo and Juliet, with the former, the bringer of good dreams, better dressed, having a nobler countenance, and a half-moon upon her head, in a folk-fusion of Mab with Diana;[9] it is "as though the freight of symbols in Pope's couplets was too slight".[2]: 51–2  Found also in Fuseli's 1780s drawing Sleeping Woman with a Cupid,[15] where the subject perhaps suggests the sleep of reason,[3]: 229  a further large lepidopteran[note 17] beneath Umbriel's back foot may reinforce the connection with erotic dreams inhabited by the Toggeli or incubi of Swiss folklore.[2]: 53 [3]: 229 

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "The Goddess with a discontented Air..." (IV.79 ff.)
  2. ^ "rob'd in white, the Nymph intent adores / With Head uncover'd..." (I.123–4)
  3. ^ "With tender Billet-doux he lights the Pyre / Then prostrate falls" (II.42–3)
  4. ^ "Belinda still her downy Pillow prest" (I.19)
  5. ^ "That ev'n in slumber caus'd her Cheek to glow" (I.24)
  6. ^ "On her white Breast a sparkling Cross she wore" (II.7)
  7. ^ "Sol through white Curtains" (I.13)
  8. ^ "the Sylphs contrive it all / Of these am I, who thy Protection claim / A watchful Sprite, and Ariel is my name" (I.104–6)
  9. ^ "Her guardian Sylph prolong'd the balmy rest / 'Twas he had summon'd to her silent Bed / The Morning Dream that hovere'd o'er her Head" (I.20–2)
  10. ^ "Thy Eyes first open'd on a Billet-doux" (I.118)
  11. ^ "the long Labours of the Toilet cease. / Belinda now..." (III.24–5)
  12. ^ "Yet am not I the first mistasken Maid / by love of Courts to num'rous Ills betray'd...The tott'ring China shook without a Wind" (IV.151–2, 163)
  13. ^ "In tasks so bold, can little Men engage" (I.11)
  14. ^ "Hear me, and touch Belinda with Chagrin" (IV.77)
  15. ^ "For, that sad moment, when the Sylphs withdrew, / and Ariel weeping from Belinda flew, / Umbriel...Repair'd to search the gloomy Cave of Spleen" (IV.11–12,16)
  16. ^ "Safe past the Gnome through this fantastic Band, / a Branch of healing Spleenwort in his Hand" (IV.55–6)
  17. ^ "Dried Butterflies..." (V.122)

References

  1. ^ a b c "Henry Fuseli Dream of Belinda 1789–90: 75 Years of Collecting Vancouver Art Gallery" (PDF). Vancouver Art Gallery. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 July 2006. Retrieved 25 February 2026.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w Halsband, Robert (1980). "Fuseli and The Rape of the Lock". The Rape of the Lock and its illustrations 1714–1896. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 44–53.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Kalman, Harold D. (1971). "Füssli, Pope and the Nightmare". Pantheon: Internationale Zeitschrift für Kunst. 29 (3): 226–36.
  4. ^ Knowles, John (1831). The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli (3 volumes). London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley.
  5. ^ "The Cave of Spleen, with Umbriel Receiving from the Goddess the Bag and Vial". British Museum. Retrieved 14 February 2026.
  6. ^ Halsband, Robert (1980). "Fuseli's Disciples". The Rape of the Lock and its illustrations 1714–1896. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 54–67.
  7. ^ Brownell, Morris R. (1982). "[Reviewed Work] Robert Halsband. The Rape of the Lock and its Illustrations 1714–1896". Eighteenth-Century Studies. 16 (1): 90–3. JSTOR 2738006.
  8. ^ a b c Kalman, Harold (1973). "Un Fuseli à Vancouver" [A Fuseli in Vancouver]. Vie des Arts (in French). 18 (71): 38–41.
  9. ^ a b Schiff, Gert (1973). Johann Heinrich Füssli 1741–1825 (2 vols) (in German). Vol. I. Zurich: Verlag Berichthaus. p. 632.
  10. ^ "The Shepherd's Dream, from 'Paradise Lost'". Tate. Retrieved 15 February 2026.
  11. ^ Cohen, Ralph (1972). "The Reversal of Gender in "The Rape of the Lock"". South Atlantic Bulletin. 37 (4): 54–60. JSTOR 3197366.
  12. ^ Delasanta, Rodney (1983). "Spleen and Wind in "The Rape of the Lock"". College Literature. 10 (1): 69–70. JSTOR 25111494.
  13. ^ Babb, Lawrence (1936). "The Cave of Spleen". The Review of English Studies. 12 (46): 165–76. JSTOR 510175.
  14. ^ Trimble, Gail (2026). "Vergilian Roleplay in The Rape of the Lock". In May, Regine; Conybeare, Catherine (eds.). Latin Lineages: A Family Tree from Catullus to Today. Trends in Classics – Pathways of Reception. De Gruyter. pp. 283–306. ISBN 978-3-111-70717-4.
  15. ^ "Sleeping Woman with a Cupid (Hush)". Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 15 February 2026.
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