VINTAGE -38 X 30MM TO THE EDGES OF THE FRAME NOT COUNTING THE SIDES OF THE PIECE EXTENDING BEYOND THE FRAMED PICTURE FOR HANDLING. --TITLE  BELOW SCENE IS --INCUBUS ---THE NIGHTMARE--IS THE PAINTINGS TITLE. MADE IN 1781 BY HENRY FUSELI.  THIS PAINTING MADE INTO AN ELECTROTYPE COPPER PATTERN FOR MAKING A  CASTING IN CUTTLEFISH OR A MOLD IN DELFT CLAY STYLE CASTING. THIS PATTERN WOULD HAVE BEEN MADE IN FRANCE AFTER 1845 BY THE PROCESS DESCRIBED BELOW AND USED FOR A PATTERN FOR A REDUCING OR ENLARGING MACHINE OR A PATTERN FOR A MOLD TO BE MADE AS DESCRIBED ABOVE. VERY RARE POSSIBLY ONE OF A KIND.

 The Nightmare is a 1781 oil painting by Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. It shows a woman in deep sleep with her arms thrown below her, and with a demonic and apelike incubus crouched on her chest. The painting's dreamlike and haunting erotic evocation of infatuation and obsession was a huge popular success.The painting was first displayed at the annual Royal Academy exhibition in London in 1782, where it shocked, titillated, and frightened exhibition visitors and critics. Unlike many of the paintings that were then popular and successful at the Royal Academy exhibitions, Fuseli’s The Nightmare has no moralizing subject. The scene is an invented one, a product of Fuseli’s imagination. It certainly has a literary character and the various figures demonstrate Fuseli’s broad knowledge of art history, but The Nightmare’s subject is not drawn from history, the Bible, or literature. The painting has yielded many interpretations and is seen as prefiguring late nineteenth-century psychoanalytic theories regarding dreams and the unconscious (Sigmund Freud allegedly kept a reproduction of the painting on the wall of his apartment in Vienna).
THIS TYPE PATTERN OR ELECTROTYPE WAS MADE AFTER 1845 IN FRANCE BY THE PROCESS DEVELOPED BY THE ELKINGTON & COMPANY OF ENGLAND IF NOT ACTUALLY MADE BY THE COMPANY ITSELF. THE ELECTROTYPES WERE MODELED FOR REDUCING OR ENLARGING MACHINES.

 ELECTROPLATING: Electricity revolutionized the trade of coating base metal objects with silver. Patented by Elkington and Company in the 1840s, this technique was the fulfilment of a century of research into the effects of electricity on metals. A negatively charged silver bar, suspended in a vat of potassium cyanide, deposited a coating of silver on a positively charged base metal (mostly copper, later nickel-silver) object immersed with it. Electroplated objects were fully formed in base metal before plating. ELECTROFORMING transferred the metal deposits directly into moulds in the plating vats. When enough metal had been deposited to create a self-supporting object the mould was removed. Developed by Alexander Parkes, electroforms so accurately mirrored the moulds in which they were created that multiple copies could be created called ELECTROTYPES.

ELECTROGILDING exploited the same technique but used gold bars instead of silver. It was safer than traditional mercury gilding.

During the electrotyping process a mould was taken of the original object. The moulds were made from gutta percha or plaster. Gutta percha was a tree-resin from Malaysia that could be melted and poured onto an object, but would set hard and take a perfect impression. During cooling it could also be manipulated. When the mould set, it was removed from the original object and then lined with graphite or plumbago to make it conductive. This mould was then immersed in the plating vats for coating with copper.

A mould was taken of the original object. In this, a copper impression was electroformed. This became a 'type pattern'. The type pattern became the source for future moulds to be made to save going back to the original object, which might be fragile or, in the case of objects in private or overseas collections, inaccessible. This  then was electroformed in copper from moulds made from a type pattern which itself was electroformed in a mould of the original object. The copper electrotype was then electroplated and electrogilded to look like the original object. The final electrotype is therefore two stages removed from the original object, but is still a highly accurate impression.

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