Henri Rousseau · The Dream

1910 – Oil on canvas – MoMA, New York

Atemporal and incredibly suggestive, “The Dream” is a sensational painting that reunites in itself all the magic and fantasy of the art by ‘Le Douanier’ Henri Rousseau, perhaps the most personal and uninhibited of all the artists who emerged immediately after the decline of Impressionism, and who described the work with this mysterious speech: “The sleeping woman on the sofa dreams that she is transported into the forest, while hearing the music of a snake charmer…”

The origins of these fantastically exotic works are so complex that they would force us to start an impossible journey through the mind of ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau, inhabited by the admiration for Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du mal”, the poems of his friend Apollinaire, and the fascination for wild nature, so typical of the Bohemian artists in the late 19th century.

Text: G. Fernández, theartwolf.com