The incubus leaving two sleeping young women

Sleep and dread mingle in this unsettling painting by Johann Heinrich Füssli, a Swiss-born artist who built his reputation in England by exploring dreams and the darker workings of the mind. Two young women lie tangled together on a couch, glowing pale against a wall of shadow, while a ghostly shape slips out through the window above. That fleeing figure is an incubus, a demon from old folklore said to prey on sleepers, and especially women, during the night. Füssli was drawn to this haunting idea again and again, most famously in his celebrated work "The Nightmare."

Created in the late 1700s, the picture fits squarely within the Romantic movement, an era when painters traded logic for feeling and reached toward mystery and the supernatural. Füssli plays light and darkness against each other to stir a mood of quiet fear, letting the sleeping figures shine while the demon remains half-hidden, more hinted at than clearly shown. Nothing dramatic is happening, yet the whole scene feels charged, catching that hazy border between waking and dreaming where imagination runs wild.