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Henri Rousseau
The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897
Rousseau and his Parisian contemporaries were fascinated by wandering gypsies, the Romany people known in France as bohémiens: men and women exiled to the fringes of society during the dramatic changes of the mid-nineteenth century. French writers and artists had historically linked the Romany to Egypt as well as Bohemia, which may explain Rousseau's depiction of a dark-skinned woman sleeping calmly -- despite the large lion sniffing at her shoulder -- in an arid landscape. With its flat planes of pure color, simple geometric forms, dreamlike atmosphere, and exotic subject, The Sleeping Gypsy at once conjures a desire for a preindustrial past and asserts its status as a new kind of modern art; the details of the lion's unnerving eye and the figure's zipperlike teeth evidence the artist's singular pictorial imagination.
Rousseau, a toll collector for the city of Paris (thus known also as Le Douanier), was largely self-taught, although he had grand ambitions of entering the Académie Française. Denied the official acceptance he craved, he later became a hero, although somewhat unwittingly, to the early-twentieth-century avant-garde painters, who claimed him as one of their own. |