The Dream

“The Dream” by Henri Rousseau is a remarkable piece of a painting from 1910. Although Henri Rousseau completed more than 25 paintings with a jungle theme in his career, but he never traveled outside France. He instead painted exotic paintings which were presented to the urban dweller through popular literature, colonial expositions, and the Paris Zoo. His painting featured lush jungle, wild animals, and mysterious horn player which were inspired by his visits to the city's natural history museum and Jardin des plantes (a combined zoo and botanical garden).

The Dream is the largest of the jungle paintings, measuring 204.5 x 298.5 cm. It features an almost voluptuous portrait of a young woman on a French sofa in the jungle surrounded by lush jungle foliage, including lotus flowers, and animals including birds, monkeys, an elephant, a lion and lioness, and a snake. The stylized forms of the jungle plants are based on Rousseau's observations at the Paris Museum of Natural History and its Jardin des Plantes. The nude's left arm reaches towards the lions and a black snake charmer who faces the viewer playing his flute, barely visible in the gloom of the jungle under the dim light of the full moon. A pink-bellied snake slithers through the undergrowth, its sinuous form reflecting the curves of the woman's hips and leg.

Suspecting that some viewers did not understand the painting, Rousseau wrote a poem to accompany it, Inscription pour La Rêve:

Yadwigha in a beautiful dream

Having fallen gently to sleep

Heard the sounds of a reed instrument

Played by a well-intentioned snake charmer.

As the moon reflected

On the rivers or flowers, the verdant trees

The wild snakes lend an ear

To the joyous tunes of the instrument.

Creator: Henri Rousseau

Date Created: 1910

Physical Dimensions: 204.5 cm x 298.5 cm

Original Title: Le Rêve

Credit Line: The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Nelson A.Rockefeller

Type: Painting

Medium: Oil on canvas