Vampires in Art History

Feature image: Vampire, Edvard Munch, 1895 via Wikipedia

Vampires are one of the most popular and famous horror icons during Halloween every year. Last year, in 2023, 2.4 million adults and children dressed up as vampires for Halloween, according to an NPR article. Vampires became popular in art, literature, and pop culture thanks to Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic novel Dracula. Since his novel’s debut, it has become a cult classic, inspiring paintings in art history and many other vampire stories such as Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series. Both series by Rice and Meyer combine horror and forbidden romance through vampires and humans, which has appealed to a large audience over the past couple of decades. Readers and viewers are drawn to the in-between of being mortal and immortal. 

In art history, specifically during Romanticism, vampires represent evil, horror, mystery, and power through nudity. Many artists were interested in vampires from Stoker’s novel and gave their own spinoffs. To further carry on the conversation of vampires, five paintings from art history depict vampires during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The paintings have themes of murder and seduction between male and female vampires turned into murder. Like the artists themselves, viewers are drawn to the mysteriousness of vampires. We’re left with questions about the vampire’s intentions and origin. Thus, the artists painted a living nightmare and inferno. . For the time being, many vampire paintings began with male vampires but gradually transitioned to lady vampires, making them both dangerous, scary, and powerful. 

Beginning in 1781, Henry Fuseli's oil on canvas painting, The Nightmare, was an example of Romanticism and Gothic horror. Interestingly, the painting does not depict a traditional and stereotypical image of a vampire that we’re used to. Instead, Fuseli took a dark approach to the concept of vampires by painting a woman in a white dress lying across a bed, and on top of her is a gargoyle-looking creature along with the shadow of the head of a horse in the far-left corner. Regarding the namesake of the title of Fuseli’s painting, he paints a living nightmare. Dr. Noelle Paulson, who wrote an article on The Nightmare, acknowledged that the painting “shows the futility of light to penetrate or explain the darker realms of the unconscious.” The painting reveals the woman’s inner thoughts and nightmares while unconscious. We can infer the gargoyle-looking creature, also credited “as an imp, or an incubus, a type of spirit said to lie atop people in their sleep or even to have sexual intercourse with sleeping women,” and the horse is figments of her imagination. The Nightmare came out before the novel Dracula. Nevertheless, Dr. Paulson acknowledges that Fuseli’s painting is solely an image from his imagination. He did not base his painting on history or religious beliefs - it’s all just horror. 

In 1850, William Adolphe-Bouguereau’s Dante and Virgil is by far the most terrifying vampire painting in art history. He took the idea of a nightmare and pure terror up a scale from Fuseli’s painting. Bouguereau focused on a group of nude vampires attacking and biting humans cascaded by motifs and imagery of horror and the devil. The painting is “dominated by beautifully idealized (often nude) figures in romanticized scenes from mythology or religion.” Thus, the work is an example of Romanticism due to the nude bodies of the vampires in the center of the painting and the distance. Yet, unlike the other vampire paintings, Bouguereau’s painting takes after the narrative Dante’s Inferno. In the narrative, Dante and Virgil are mortal poets who venture into the inferno. So, in Bouguereau’s painting, Dante and Virgil are seen in the left corner of the painting. They’re not the two naked men in the center of the painting. Bouguereau wants the audience to witness the hell unleashed in the inferno from the vampires. Regarding the vampires alone – they’re terrifying and in for the kill. In the middle of the painting, there’s a nude male vampire with red hair biting the neck of a brunette human male. Then, beside them is another naked man who’s alive but injured on the ground. Meanwhile, in the background, a devilish-looking vampire with wings smiles peevishly as he looks down at the two men in the center of the painting. 

Later, in 1897, Philip Burne-Jones drew an illustration titled The Vampire. The black and white illustration features a woman and man in bed, and the woman is bending over him as he sleeps. Like Fuseli’s painting, the woman is in a white dress, but she is wide awake. As the audience, we can infer she’s taking on the role of the vampire, given her sinister smile and stare. Furthermore, we can guess she has already bitten the man’s neck or is getting ready, too. Regardless, she is in control here. Burne-Jones’s illustration came out the same year Stoker’s novel Dracula did. The illustration is considered a “gender swap” of Dracula since, traditionally and literary speaking, Dracula is a male character. Now, Burne-Jones has painted a “lady vampire,” as he called it, which is empowering given that the illustration was featured in the late eighteenth century. 

Edvard Munch, a favorite artist of ours here at ArtRKL, painted Vampire in 1895. Initially, his work was called “Love and Pain,” but over time, the name changed due to the massive embrace the woman with red hair gave the man. There have been many interpretations of the characters in the painting, but the woman has been classified as a vampire due to her long red hair. Her hair is a bright red color and it takes up most of the space of Munch’s painting. She has the hair of a siren, so it's unclear if her embrace is intentional to the man or if she just wants to suck his blood. 

Lastly, during the late eighteenth century, John Collier was a Pre-Raphaelite painter who painted a nude woman named Lilith coiled around snakes. His work is set up from John William Waterhouse’s work, featuring fantasy and mythological women. The painting correlates many themes based on the images of Lilith and the snakes. Lilith’s nude body revealing her lady parts indicates sexuality and sensuality driving in her viewers. However, the snakes wrapped around her are a sign of evil and doom. Traditionally, snakes have always been a sign of evil and the devil’s work in the bible. Nevertheless, Lilith is no Eve here. The name Lilith alone means “belonging to the night.” Thus, she is a foil of the character Eve from the Bible. Based on Collier’s art, Lilith is not an innocent sexual woman because she’s holding the head of a snake gracefully. She has other intentions for unlucky mortals. 

Vampires have been and will always be a famous icon during Halloween. We are drawn to them for their scary, manipulative, seductive, and ungodly image. Vampires are imperfect mythical creatures that don’t hesitate to cause chaos. The writers and artists mentioned in this article gave us the idea that vampires can do anything scandalous, such as murder and seduction. The natural beauty and takeaway from the artists is that the image of vampires is not gender biased. Men and women can both be vampires and cause the same wrath, which is why vampires have appealed to everyone for centuries. In addition, we’re challenged with the question of being mortal or immortal through vampires.