The Dream

Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (or Le Rêve) is a manifesto for the untrained eye, a defiant assertion that imagination requires no passport. Painted in 1910, this is the artist’s final major work, a grand summation of a career that was, by any conventional measure, an anomaly. A former customs toll collector, Rousseau, nicknamed Le Douanier, never left Paris, yet he populated his canvases with jungles as lush as any in the Amazon. He drew his inspiration not from travel, but from the city’s Jardin des Plantes, a combined zoo and botanical garden. "When I am in these hothouses and see the strange plants from exotic lands," he once said, "it seems to me that I am entering a dream". This painting is the literalization of that statement. A nude woman, identified by the artist as Yadwigha, a Polish mistress from his youth, reclines stiffly on a crimson divan, her body planted improbably in the middle of a dense jungle. Her pose borrows from the grand tradition of the reclining nude, from Titian’s Venus of Urbino to Manet’s Olympia, yet her surroundings are utterly incongruous. She stares out with a placid, almost vacant expression, her left arm extended as if beckoning the viewer into her bizarre fantasy. The composition is a stunning exercise in controlled chaos. Rousseau layers over twenty distinct shades of green to build a canopy of immense, ornamental leaves. Stylised lotus blossoms erupt from the undergrowth, while a menagerie of exotic wildlife: birds, monkeys, an elephant, and a pair of lions, lurks within the foliage. The space is radically flat, ignoring the academic rules of linear perspective. Figures do not recede into the background; they stack on top of each other, creating a tapestry-like effect. The handling of light is similarly idiosyncratic. A full moon hangs in the upper left, casting a pale, diffuse glow over the scene. This light picks out the sharp contours of the leaves and illuminates the sinuous, pink-bellied snake that slithers through the foreground, its curves an echo of the woman’s own hips and leg. In the dim gloom of the background, a black snake charmer plays his flute, the source of the music that has, according to Rousseau’s accompanying poem, enchanted the dreaming Yadwigha. When The Dream was first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910, the public was accustomed to mocking Rousseau’s work. But the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire recognised its radical power. "The picture radiates beauty," he wrote, "that is indisputable. I believe nobody will laugh this year". What Apollinaire perceived was a new kind of sincerity. This is a painting that operates entirely on its own terms. It is a collision of the domestic (the velvet divan) and the wild (the jungle), the classical (the reclining nude) and the primitive (the flat, graphic foliage). The result is a work of uncanny exactitude that feels both profoundly naive and eerily sophisticated. The Dream is a portal into a world that never existed outside of one man’s imagination, and it remains a testament to the power of seeing the exotic in the everyday.