The Dream

The verse Rousseau printed with it

Rousseau wrote eight lines of verse to go with the painting, and they were printed in the pamphlet of the 1910 Salon des Indépendants, where the picture was catalogue number 4468. They name the sleeper, who has no name anywhere else.

“Having fallen into a gentle sleep / Yadwigha, in a dream, / Heard the sounds of a musette / Played by a benevolent magician. / While the moon shone down / Upon the flowers, the green trees, / The wild serpents listened to / The instrument's merry tunes.”

One word in the French has been wrong in print for a century. The sixth line reads Sur les fleurs, les arbres verdoyants, on the flowers, the green trees. Wilhelm Uhde, Rousseau's first biographer, transcribed fleurs as fleuves, rivers, and the 1985 catalogue records that later writers copied the mistake, Guillaume Apollinaire among them. Dora Vallier went further and suggested that Apollinaire wrote the verse rather than Rousseau; the Museum of Modern Art rejects that. The linguist Roman Jakobson analyzed the poem's structure in Linguistic Inquiry in January 1970.

Why there is a sofa in the jungle

People asked Rousseau about the furniture, and he answered twice, differently. On 1 April 1910 he wrote to the critic André Dupont to explain it. The woman asleep on the couch, he said, is dreaming that she has been transported into the forest and is hearing the sounds of the enchanter's instrument. On that account the jungle is inside her head and the sofa is the only real object in the picture.

To André Salmon he gave the other answer: the sofa is there only because of its glowing red color. The Museum of Modern Art has printed both since 1942 without choosing between them.

The setting came from a fifteen-minute walk. The museum's gallery label quotes Rousseau on the Paris botanical gardens: when he was in the hothouses among the strange plants from other countries, he said, it seemed to him that he was entering a dream. He never went further than that. The label for the 2021 display makes the consequence plain, calling him a crucial precedent for Surrealist painters such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte.

The last Salon

Rousseau sent one painting to the Salon des Indépendants in March 1910 and this was it. A week before the opening he wrote to Guillaume Apollinaire asking for help. Everyone likes the large picture, he wrote. He hoped Apollinaire would use his literary talent to avenge him for all the insults and affronts he had received.

Apollinaire delivered. His review in L'Intransigeant of 18 March 1910 said the painting held a beauty that was indisputable, and that he did not believe anyone would dare laugh that year. The painters, he wrote, were unanimous in their admiration, even of the Louis-Philippe sofa lost in the virgin forest.

Not everyone agreed. Louis Dimier wrote in L'Action Française on 19 March that Rousseau was a fugitive from the customs office whose failings had not discouraged the gaping art-lover or the clever merchants. Henri Ghéon called the greenery applied, ridiculous and decorative in the Nouvelle Revue Française that May. The Italian painter Ardengo Soffici wrote about it with more penetration than Apollinaire, in the judgment of the 1985 catalogue. The couch, the naked body, the moon, the birds, the beasts and the flowers made a purely artistic unity, he wrote, independent of any discursive logic.

André Breton returned to it in 1942. He was almost on the point of believing, he wrote, that all the poetry and mysterious gestations of the age were present in the canvas. The day would come, he added, when it would be carried through the streets in procession like Cimabue's Maestà.

Is it his last painting?

The Museum of Modern Art has said so repeatedly, calling it his last completed painting in 1985 and the last painting by the artist in 1954. Rousseau died of gangrene in Paris on 2 September 1910, six months after the Salon opened, with seven people at his funeral.

The museum's own catalogue complicates the claim. On 5 March 1910 Rousseau wrote to the dealer Ambroise Vollard that The Dream was finished and that he was beginning a new canvas whose subject would be a fight between a lion and a horse. A receipt dated 22 March 1910 records a hundred francs paid by Vollard for a picture of a combat between a jaguar and a horse. That painting, Horse Attacked by a Jaguar, is in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

So the accurate form is narrower: The Dream is the last of his big, ambitious canvases, and the last work he finished before the 1910 Salon. At least one smaller picture was started and paid for after it.

Vollard, Knoedler, Janis, Rockefeller

Ambroise Vollard was the painting's first owner, and the 1985 catalogue notes that he may have commissioned it. From Vollard it went to M. Knoedler & Co. in New York and then to the Sidney Janis Gallery. The museum's 1942 press release records it as Sidney Janis's loan, given a whole wall to itself at the end of that year's Rousseau exhibition.

Nelson A. Rockefeller bought it from a New York private collector who had acquired it in 1933, and gave it to the Museum of Modern Art in 1954, where it is accession 252.1954. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. called it the culminating masterpiece of Rousseau's career and one of the capital achievements of modern French painting.

One number about the surface has been repeated ever since 1942, when Daniel Catton Rich put it in the museum's catalogue: an artist counted more than fifty variations of green in the picture. Rich did not name the artist, and no technical study has replaced the figure.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Rousseau packed more into this canvas than into any of his other jungles, and several of its inhabitants are easy to walk past. Take the woman and the piper first, then hunt for the animals hiding in the leaves.

Detail views use the same reproduction throughout. Museum of Modern Art record for The Dream (252.1954).