The Sleeping Gypsy
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| Artist | Henri Rousseau |
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| Year | 1897 |
| Type | oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 129.5 cm × 200.7 cm (51.0 in × 79.0 in) |
| Location | Museum of Modern Art |
The Sleeping Gypsy (French: La Bohémienne endormie) is an 1897 oil painting by French Naïve artist Henri Rousseau. The fantastical depiction of a lion musing over a sleeping woman on a moonlit night is one of the most recognizable artworks of modern times.
Rousseau first exhibited the painting at the 13th Salon des Indépendants, and tried unsuccessfully to sell it to the mayor of his hometown, Laval. Instead, it entered the private collection of a Parisian charcoal merchant where it remained until 1924, when it was discovered by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles. The Paris-based art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler purchased the painting in 1924, although a controversy arose regarding the painting was a forgery. It was acquired by art historian Alfred H. Barr Jr. for the New York Museum of Modern Art.
The oil painting has served as inspiration for poetry and music, and has been altered and parodied by various artists often with the lion replaced by a dog or other animal. In the Simpsons episode “Mom and Pop Art” Homer dreams of waking up in the artwork with the lion licking his head.
Henri Rousseau
| Henri Rousseau | |
|---|---|
 Self Portrait of the Artist with a Lamp |
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| Birth name | Henri Julien Félix Rousseau |
| Born | 21 May 1844(1844-05-21) Laval, Mayenne |
| Died | 2 September 1910 (aged 66) Paris, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Field | Painting |
| Training | Self-taught |
| Movement | Post-Impressionism, Naïve art, Primitivism |
| Works | The Sleeping Gypsy, The Merry Jesters, The Snake Charmer |
| Influenced | Fernand Léger, Max Beckmann, Jean Hugo |
Henri Julien Félix Rousseau (May 21, 1844 – September 2, 1910) was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naive or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer) after his place of employment. Ridiculed during his life, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality.
Background
Henri Rousseau was born in Laval, Mayenne in the Loire Valley into the family of a plumber. He attended Laval High School as a day student and then as a boarder, after his father became a debtor and his parents had to leave the town upon the seizure of their house. He was mediocre in some subjects at the high school but won prizes for drawing and music. He worked for a lawyer and studied law, but “attempted a small perjury and sought refuge in the army,” serving for four years, starting in 1863. With his father’s death, Rousseau moved to Paris in 1868 to support his widowed mother as a government employee. In 1868 he married Clémence Boitard, his landlord’s 15 year-old daughter, with whom he had 9 children (only 7 survived). In 1871, he was promoted to the toll collector’s office in Paris as a tax collector. His wife died in 1888 and he later remarried Josephine Noury in 1898. He started painting seriously in his early forties, and by age 49 in 1893 he retired from his job to work on his art full time.
Rousseau claimed he had “no teacher other than nature”, although he admitted he had received “some advice” from two established Academic painters, Félix Auguste-Clément and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Essentially he was self-taught and is considered to be a naive or primitive painter.
Paintings
His best known oil paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never left France or saw a jungle. Stories spread by admirers that his army service included the French expeditionary force to Mexico are unfounded. His inspiration came from illustrated books and the botanical gardens in Paris, as well as tableaux of taxidermied wild animals. He had also met soldiers, during his term of service, who had survived the French expedition to Mexico and listened to their stories of the subtropical country they had encountered. To the critic Arsène Alexandre, he described his frequent visits to the Jardin des Plantes: “When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream.”
Along with his exotic scenes there was a concurrent output of smaller topographical images of the city and its suburbs.
He claimed to have invented a new genre of portrait landscape, which he achieved by starting a painting with a view such as a favorite part of the city, and then depicting a person in the foreground.
