Triumph of Death: Three Skeletons Invading a Bacchanal Orchestrated by a Magician or an Evil Demon

Fuseli often dwelled on the macabre and the sensational, as in this drawing, and occasionally allowed his unconscious mind to dictate his subject matter. “For if these images so pursue us when our minds are in a kind of waking dream,” he wrote, “why should we not use this vice of the mind?”Fuseli’s art played a role in his age’s taste for the Gothic. It was an era that saw the emergence of distinctly modern forms of cultural consumption: romances, sentimental novels and, most important, Gothic novels and plays focusing on themes of terror and the supernatural. As Fuseli’s student Benjamin Haydon wrote, “Amongst all classes [Fuseli] was considered a painter of horrors.”