Henri Rousseau‘s 1910 magnum opus The Dream (Le Rêve) has captivated and confounded audiences for over a century. This monumental painting, measuring approximately 6 by 9 feet, presents a fantastical moonlit jungle brimming with lush vegetation and exotic animals. Amidst this oneiric landscape recline two mysterious human figures – a dark-skinned flute player and a nude woman lost in reverie on a divan. The absurd juxtaposition of elements creates an uncanny, cryptic scene that demands decoding.
The Unlikely Artist
To understand The Dream, one must first examine its singular creator. Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) was the definition of an outsider artist. Born in Laval, France, he worked as a toll collector until the relatively advanced age of 49 before retiring to pursue painting full-time. As an autodidact, Rousseau never received formal artistic training, instead developing his craft through diligent practice and studying the old masters in the Louvre [^1].
Rousseau‘s unique style, dubbed "naïve" or "primitive," features flattened forms, bold colors, and eschews academic conventions like perspective and modeling. His paintings have a childlike frankness and simplicity, evoking the untrained directness of folk art. During his lifetime, Rousseau was often ridiculed by critics for his unrefined, "amateurish" technique. In a notorious review, one critic quipped "Monsieur Rousseau paints with his feet, with a blindfold over his eyes."[^2]
However, Rousseau found champions among the avant-garde, who appreciated the primal vitality of his vision. Picasso, Delaunay, Apollinaire and Kandinsky all collected his work [^3]. Upon seeing Rousseau‘s paintings at the 1886 Salon des Indépendants, Camille Pissarro exclaimed, "He is a force with which to be reckoned!" [^4] Rousseau‘s raw, unmediated expression anticipated the radical formal experiments of Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism.
Welcome to the Jungle
The Dream exemplifies the lush jungle scenes that became Rousseau‘s signature subject in the final two decades of his career. He first explored this exotic theme in Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) from 1891, and subsequently in works like The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope (1905) and The Snake Charmer (1907).
These fantastical landscapes were conjured entirely from Rousseau‘s imagination and visits to the greenhouses of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, which housed tropical plants and animals. Of these floral encounters, Rousseau marveled, "It is from them that I have learned to make my first pictures in the torrid zones."[^5] The Dream‘s dense, layered vegetation attests to Rousseau‘s careful study of botanical specimens. He employs over twenty shades of green to render the foliage, creating mesmerizing rhythmic patterns and a sense of explosive growth.
The titular reverie belongs to the nude woman languidly reclining on a red divan in the center of the composition. Her curvaceous pale form contrasts sharply with the dark skin of the standing male flute player before her. According to Rousseau, she is his Polish mistress Yadwigha, who has been magically transported into this exotic dreamscape [^6]. Her pose openly references famous art historical nudes like Titian‘s Venus of Urbino or Manet‘s Olympia.
However, Rousseau makes his odalisque the focal point of a hallucinatory jungle teeming with fauna. A pink-bellied snake, lion, elephant, birds and monkeys lurk amidst the enormous leaves and draping vines. Rousseau‘s creatures have a toy-like simplicity, recalling the wood and tin animal figurines he collected [^7]. Each element is painted with almost obsessive detail, from the wide-eyed monkey gazing at the viewer to the giraffe patterning on the snake.
Symbols and the Subconscious
The Dream‘s mysterious, irrational imagery has invited endless interpretations from critics and scholars. Many have detected an undercurrent of eroticism, stemming from the nude woman‘s Venusian pose and phallic snake and flute. Her creamy flesh and sensual curves contrast with the rigid, vertical forms of the vegetation, creating a sexual tension. As the art historian Roger Shattuck notes, "the woman‘s elaborate hairdo metamorphoses into the foliage; the red sofa metamorphoses into the red jungle flowers…Metamorphosis is the law of dreams." [^8]
Rousseau‘s interest in exploring subconscious desires through symbolism parallels Sigmund Freud‘s contemporary psychoanalytic theories. Freud argued that dreams were the mind‘s way of fulfilling repressed wishes, often through bizarre, coded imagery. The Surrealists especially embraced The Dream as a Freudian revelation of the psyche‘s hidden depths. They perceived its strange juxtapositions and flattened forms as precursors to their own efforts to liberate the imagination from reason and reality.
Other scholars have proposed biographical readings of The Dream, linking it to Rousseau‘s failing health, deteriorating marriage, and unrequited love for Yadwigha [^9]. Towards the end of his life when he painted the canvas, Rousseau faced poverty and obscurity, exhibiting works to little recognition. Perhaps The Dream represents a escapist fantasy – an Edenic paradise away from his daily hardships where his exotic muse comes to life.
The painting also reflects Rousseau‘s literary interests, particularly the Symbolist poetry of Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The nude woman and dark flautist echo characters from Mallarmé‘s poem L‘après-midi d‘un faune (Afternoon of a Faun), in which mythological creatures pursue erotic encounters in an idyllic natural setting [^10]. Like the faun, the viewer of The Dream gains voyeuristic access to a private, sensual reverie. The critic Philippe Soupault praised the painting as a visualization of "the poet‘s dreams, the painter‘s dreams, the dreams we have at night that we can never recall." [^11]
Debut and Legacy
Rousseau first exhibited The Dream at the 1910 Salon des Indépendants, accompanied by an evocative poem further blurring boundaries between painting and poetry, reality and dream:
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 [^12]
While some critics dismissed the work as childish, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire declared it radiated an undeniable beauty. Shortly after, Rousseau fell ill with an infected leg wound and died that September at age 66, unaware of the posthumous acclaim that awaited him. The Dream was the last major painting Rousseau completed, a poignant final statement.
The painting passed from Rousseau to the dealer Ambroise Vollard, who gave it to fellow dealer Berthe Weill. In 1924, Weill sold The Dream to the surrealist painter Robert Delaunay. By 1934, it came into the collection of the influential American dealer Sidney Janis, who introduced Rousseau‘s work to the next generation of avant-garde artists like Max Ernst, Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock [^13]. The young Frida Kahlo was so struck by The Dream at Janis‘ gallery, she painted a self-portrait in a similar pose and jungle setting [^14].
In 1954, the collector Nelson Rockefeller acquired The Dream from Janis and generously donated it to the Museum of Modern Art, where it remains a highlight to this day. Alfred Barr, MoMA‘s founding director, praised it as "one of the most remarkable and memorable paintings of our time…with its woman half-hidden in the midst of a jungle as surprising and haunting as a real dream." [^15]
Over a century after Rousseau‘s death, The Dream endures as a visionary masterpiece. In dissolving distinctions between real and unreal, material and psychological, it expands the boundaries of painting itself. The Dream ultimately invites the viewer into Rousseau‘s enigmatic dreamscape – a lush, private world of erotic and exotic encounters. Its cryptic symbols and naive style continue to engender new readings with each generation, making it an inexhaustible modernist icon. As Apollinaire wrote, "The picture radiates beauty, that is indisputable. I believe nobody will laugh this year." [^16]
References
[^1]: Dora Vallier, Henri Rousseau (New York: Crown, 1979), 7.[^2]: Philippe Soupault, Henri Rousseau (Plon, 1927), quoted in Jean Bouret, Henri Rousseau (Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 1961), 81.
[^3]: Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 101.
[^4]: Dora Vallier, Henri Rousseau (New York: Crown, 1979), 26.
[^5]: "Remarks on Painting," in Portraits and Poems by Henri Rousseau, trans. Don Bachardy (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1977), 21.
[^6]: Cornelia Stabenow, Henri Rousseau 1844-1910 (Cologne: Taschen, 2001), 86.
[^7]: Carolyn Lanchner, Henri Rousseau (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1985), 60.
[^8]: Roger Shattuck, The Innocent Eye (New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984) 169.
[^9]: Henry Certigny, La Vérité sur le Douanier Rousseau (Plon, 1961), 139.
[^10]: Nancy Ireson, Interpreting Henri Rousseau (London: Tate, 2005), 56.
[^11]: Philippe Soupault, Henri Rousseau (Paris: Rieder, 1927), 10.
[^12]: Quoted in translation in Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 104.
[^13]: Carolyn Lanchner, Henri Rousseau (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1985) 25.
[^14]: Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (Harper Collins, 2002) 158.
[^15]: Alfred H. Barr Jr., Masters of Modern Art (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954), 112.
[^16]: Guillaume Apollinaire, "Les Indépendants," L‘Intransigeant (March 18, 1910).
