The Dream of Belinda

Henry Fuseli painted The Dream of Belinda around 1780, depicting the dream sequence from Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock in which the heroine is attended by her sylph guardian Ariel while sleeping. The subject connected Fuseli's interest in the boundary between sleeping and waking consciousness with the literary tradition of the sylph — a creature of pure air, lighter than human spirit — that Pope had invented for the poem's delicate mock-heroic machinery. Fuseli's rendering of the supernatural attendant as a figure of erotic beauty rather than allegorical abstraction gives the work the transgressive dimension that is his consistent contribution to literary illustration.

Fuseli renders the sleeping Belinda in luminous white against the darkness, with the ethereal sylph hovering above. The contrast between the corporeal figure and the supernatural visitor creates the eerie atmosphere Fuseli mastered in "The Nightmare" and related works.