The Sleeping Gypsy 1897

Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) was entirely self-taught and did not embark upon an artistic career until relatively late in life. He worked in a number of minor administrative jobs before retiring on a small pension to paint full time, and he exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants. Throughout his life he had a great love of music, and he supplemented his income by teaching music, and later by taking in art students. His work was highly criticized during his life, and mostly regarded as uneducated and immature. Rousseau worked slowly and carefully using many layers of paint and exotic, jewellike colors, and had a fairly small output. The Sleeping Gypsy is one of the most famous images of the modern era, and is stunning in the simplicity of its composition combined with the subtlety of its execution. The beautiful and monumental figure of the gypsy seps quietly while the lion watches over her, the whole scene bathed in the eerie light of a full moon. The image is both intensely surreal and dreamlike, but also strangely real and the image works on both levels of interpretation. Rousseau offered the painting to the town of Laval, his hometown, for two or three hundred francs, but the town turned it down on account of the painting being "too childish." Yet Rousseau's simplified forms and imaginative use of space and symbol was admired by many arts, especially those who made the transition into Modernist painting, among whom were Picasso. Delaunay, Kandinsky, Brancusi, and Matisse.