Description
| Year of creation: | 1910 |
| Original size: | 298.5 cm x 204.5 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Museum of Modern Art, New York |
The Dream, 1910
The Dream is Rousseau’s last completed work and the largest canvas he ever painted: 298.5 x 204.5 cm. It belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was shown in the spring of 1910, a few months before the painter’s death.
A woman on a sofa in the jungle
On the left of the canvas a nude woman lies on a red sofa out of a bourgeois drawing room, and around her the undergrowth opens with lions, an elephant, a snake, birds and a dark-skinned figure playing a pipe. The sofa in the jungle is not a mistake but the centre of the picture: Rousseau joined a space he knew to a space he invented and made no attempt to reconcile them. That is precisely why the painting became a reference for the Surrealists half a century later. The same density of foliage, without figures, is The Equatorial Jungle.
The poem the painter wrote beside it
Rousseau attached a short verse to the work, printed in the catalogue of the 1910 Salon des Indépendants. In it a woman sleeps and hears the sounds of a musette played by a well-meaning charmer. Both spellings are in print in 1910: the Salon des Indépendants catalogue (26th exhibition, no. 4468, p. 294) gives Yadurgha, while Comœdia of 19 March 1910 gives Yadwigha and records Rousseau telling Arsène Alexandre that the name was that of a young Polish woman he had known in his youth. The same poem, in two halves, also opens our gallery page. Rousseau was sixty-six when he painted this and had been painting for nearly thirty years, mostly under ridicule; this was the first canvas that even his detractors described as serious work. A comparable scene with a sleeping figure and a beast is The Sleeping Gypsy.
The hand-painted reproduction
This canvas is prepared specifically for your order, to order, in the size you choose. This motif carries the widest size ladder on our shelf, from the smallest format to almost three metres; the painter works from the original and the proportions stay the same at every size. The canvas arrives stretched on a wooden stretcher frame and ready to hang, without an added frame. The full range is in the Henri Rousseau gallery, and a related forest figure is Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest. The same layered foliage around a source of light is The Waterfall.
- Motif: a nude woman on a sofa in the jungle, with lions, an elephant and a piper
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted to order
- Sizes: from 50 x 35 cm to 299 x 207 cm
- Point of interest: Rousseau’s last completed work and the largest of his jungles
