The Dream
Henri Rousseau (1844 to 1910) · 1910
A nude woman reclines on a red velvet sofa in the middle of a jungle. Enormous leaves and lotus flowers close in around her, two lions peer out of the foliage, a snake slides through the grass, birds perch in the branches and a dark skinned musician plays a pipe in the shadows. A full moon lights the whole scene with an even silver glow. Rousseau attached a short poem to the painting when he exhibited it: the woman, Yadwigha, is dreaming that she has been carried into the forest and hears the music of the enchanter.
This was the last great canvas of Rousseau's life, painted in the months before he died, and it is the most elaborate of his jungle scenes. He had never left France; his jungles came from the hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes, from illustrated magazines and from the taxidermy at the natural history museum. Look at the sheer number of greens, more than fifty by some counts, and at how every leaf is painted in full, layer over layer, so that the canvas becomes a dense tapestry. The sofa and the nude are painted with the same hard clarity as the plants, which is what makes the picture so strange.
When The Dream was shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910 the critics, for once, admired it, and the poet Apollinaire declared that no one could laugh at Rousseau any longer. It was bought by the dealer Ambroise Vollard, passed through several collections and was given to MoMA in 1954 by Nelson Rockefeller. Find the pink bird in the branches, the elephant's eyes among the leaves and the tiny orange snake, and then find the sofa again and ask yourself where the light is coming from.
Did You Know? Rousseau said he included the sofa because the woman dreaming on it had been carried into the forest, sofa and all, and he saw nothing odd about that.
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