Description
| Year of creation: | 1897 |
| Original size: | 200.7 cm x 129.5 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Museum of Modern Art, New York |
The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897
The Sleeping Gypsy is Rousseau’s best known work after The Dream and one of the most reproduced canvases of the nineteenth century. The 1897 painting belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and measures 200.7 x 129.5 cm.
A lion over a sleeping figure
A woman in a striped robe lies on sand, a mandolin and a jar beside her, and a lion stands over her, scenting. The sky is deep blue with a large moon and the horizon is a straight line with nothing on it. The scene is entirely silent: the lion does not attack, the woman does not wake, and it is that withheld moment that has kept the picture in memory. Rousseau offered the work to the mayor of Laval, his birthplace, who declined it; the canvas then stayed unknown for decades and was rediscovered only in 1923. A comparable stillness beside a beast is The Dream.
How the space is built
Nothing here is painted from life. The desert is a plane, the lion is assembled from fur Rousseau knew at the zoo, and the robe is a pattern rather than a fabric. No shadow falls from the lion onto the sand and no depth is produced by aerial perspective; depth is carried by the size of the figures alone. That absence of shadow is exactly what the Surrealists later read as dream space. The same procedure on a large canvas is Mauvaise surprise.
The hand-painted reproduction
Hand work in oil is what you receive, onto gallery canvas, in the size you choose. The painter works from the original; because the source is markedly horizontal the proportions are held at every format, so the moon and the horizon stay where they belong. 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 celestial body, painted as a flat disc without rays, appears in View of the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadéro.
- Motif: a sleeping figure, a lion, a mandolin and a jar in moonlight
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted to order
- Sizes: from 80 x 50 cm to 201 x 130 cm
- Point of interest: refused at Laval, then forgotten for decades and rediscovered only in 1923
