The Dream (1910)
The Dream is an apt title for the present work, with its surreal depiction of a nude woman reclining on a sofa in a forest. The woman is surrounded by colorful, painstakingly depicted greenery - which reportedly included at least twenty-two shades of green - and inhabitants of the jungle, including several wide-eyed lions who gaze at the strange scene or at the viewer. This image of a humorously out-of-place academic-style nude - reminiscent of neoclassical odalisques portrayed by artists such as Ingres and perhaps modeled on a Polish woman Rousseau once loved - in an exotic setting far from the artist's native France may be seen as Rousseau's response to late 19th century French colonialist expansion to lands he experienced only through his visits to museums and visual media like magazines and postcards. With its incredible attention to detail, The Sleeping Gypsy is created by Henri Rousseau at 1897. With a mysterious poetry, the lion visits the gypsy woman and her mandolin in this masterful composition that somehow employs hard lines and flattish perspectives to great advantage.
In The Sleeping Gypsy, Rousseau portrays an African gypsy in a desert wearing an Oriental costume. She lies beside an Italian stringed instrument and jar of water. These items each have significant importance to the cultures in which they belong. The Oriental frock and mandolin are all customary to their respective Asian and Italian cultures. However, Rousseau decides to mix them all together in his own painting.
Rousseau was largely a self-taught painter.Although he had ambitions of entering the academy, this was never realized. But the sharp colors, fantastic imagery, and precise outlines in his work derived from the style and subject matter of popular print culturestruck a chord with a younger generation of avant-garde painters.