The Angel of the Odd: an exhibition that ends with a satisfying shiver

To some extent, all Romanticism has its origins in darkness, coming in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that introduced fear into the age of reason. ‘Reason’s Sleep Produces Monsters’ proclaims the opening drawing in Goya’s series ‘Los Caprichos’ (1797–99), which features in this entertaining exhibition. After all the cruelties that man had inflicted on man at the 18th century’s twilight, it was only natural to turn to ghosts and witches for light relief. The exhibition’s title comes from an Edgar Allan Poe story but Goya’s phrase would be equally appropriate.

Most popular

Ella Dorn

Woke was invented by angry schoolgirls

The exhibition starts not with Goya but with F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), one of those German expressionist films that so influenced early cinema: silent and in black and white. Nosferatu was based, without attribution, on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and another clip, this one from Bela Lugosi’s Hollywood Dracula, is one of the exhibition’s funniest moments. Romantics, with their penchant for gore and thunder, could tip over into unintentional absurdity — for example, in portraying Milton’s Lucifer as a Byronic hero, or in a gleeful Mephistopheles flying like a bat through the sky, as in Delacroix’s 1828 lithograph for Goethe’s Faust. Delacroix’s skill makes the subject work but in lesser hands it would not. Of course, laughter can be mixed with unease. John Martin’s majestic ‘Pandemonium’ (1841) from Paradise Lost is impressive, especially in its frame decorated with serpents; it was as well that Martin expressed his interest in hellfire on canvas rather than by imitating his brother, who tried to set fire to York Minster.

Horace Walpole thought Fuseli was mad and in the 20th century Sacheverell Sitwell detected evil in his work. ‘Mad Kate’ (1806–7), in Fuseli’s illustration for Cowper’s poem ‘The Task’ (to this eye reminiscent of Romney), does indeed look convincingly unhinged.