The Sleeping Gypsy
Henri Rousseau (1844 to 1910) · 1897
A woman lies asleep on the sand of a moonlit desert, wrapped in a striped robe, a mandolin and a water jar beside her. A lion has walked up to her and stands sniffing at her shoulder, its tail lifted, its eye a small bright disc. Behind them a river or a strip of sea glows under a pale sky, and a full moon hangs above distant hills. Nothing moves. Rousseau explained the picture in a letter: a wandering mandolin player, dead tired, has fallen asleep, and a lion happens to pass by and does not devour her.
Rousseau was a self taught painter who worked for years as a toll collector in Paris, and the picture has the clarity of a dream rather than an observation. Look at the way every form is outlined and filled with a single tone, at the impossible lighting that comes from nowhere, and at the precise stripes of the robe, each one carefully drawn. The lion's mane is combed into neat curls and its eye is painted like a jewel. These are the qualities that the Surrealists later admired, and Picasso was among the first to collect his work.
The painting was rejected when Rousseau offered it to his home town of Laval and disappeared into private hands for decades. It resurfaced in the 1920s, was acquired by the dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler and then by the American collector John Quinn, and came to MoMA in 1939 as a gift of Mrs Simon Guggenheim. It has never lost its mystery. Look at the shadows, or rather the lack of them: neither the lion nor the woman casts one, which is why the scene feels suspended outside time.
Did You Know? Rousseau signed the painting with his name and the date on the sand, and he priced it for his home town of Laval at what he called a modest sum, which the town still refused.
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