With dramatic illumination Fuseli sets off the group of Lear and Cordelia from Shakespeare’s King Lear from the dark background. The now insane king holds his dead daughter in his arms and despairingly acknowledges his guilt. The ghostly white of the pair breaks into the figures’ stable triangular composition like intense pain, like grief and insanity. In the arrangement of Lear and Cordelia, Fuseli is also quoting the motif of the pietà, the Mother of God with her dead son.