Henri Rousseau – The Sleeping Gypsy

“Beneath the gypsy moon
things are watching her
and she can’t watch them.”

(Federico García Lorca, Dreamwalker Ballad)

Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897

I have been absolutely enchanted by Henri Rousseau’s whimsical and dream-like paintings. Despite working a monotonous, non-artistic job as a tax collector, Rousseau used his spare time to create an enchanting verdant world of jungles, tigers, lions, flamingoes and sleeping ladies. While his fellow artists drew inspiration from the Parisian life that was around them, Rousseau escaped the fin de siecle Paris and painted his dreams on lush, tropical canvases. Still, lions and jungles aside for now, it is Rousseau’s painting “The Sleeping Gypsy”, painted in 1897, that has been my favourite these past few weeks. There is just something about it!

As the title suggests, the painting shows a desert scene with a sleeping woman, a lion and a moon. All three seem equal characters in this strange, mystical, dream-like scene and the painting would be incomplete with either element missing. The woman is dressed in vibrant, striped robes and there are mandolin and a tall jar beside her. She is sleeping; the moon is watching her, but she is not watching the moon because her eyes are closed. Blissfully, she is sleeping, unaware of the danger of the lion beside her. Sleeping and dreaming. Perhaps the lion is only a part of her dream and not a real lion. Perhaps even the moon and the desert are a part of her dream and not a part of her real, physical surrounding. The lyrical beauty of the painting is tangible, almost seeping from the painting and spreading out into my reality. Especially these warm summer nights the desert seems tangible, the hot air that turns colder at night imaginable, the quietness in the air, the emptiness of the vast space. The gypsy, the moon; both elements made me think of the poetry of Federico García Lorca and his “Gypsy Ballads”; Lorca’s poems are full of images, and Rousseau’s painting is poetic. Here is what Rousseau wrote about the painting: “A wandering Negress, a mandolin player, lies with her jar beside her (a vase with drinking water), overcome by fatigue in a deep sleep. A lion chances to pass by, picks up her scent yet does not devour her. There is a moonlight effect, very poetic. The scene is set in a completely arid desert. The gypsy is dressed in oriental costume.”

There are many ways to interpret the painting, naturally; the gypsy woman with her vibrant, exotic clothes and her vagabund, nomadic lifestyle may represent freedom, choosing adventure over possessions, the lion may represent dangers that lurk at the woman throughout her life, while the woman’s state of sleeping may be seen as something vulnerable or innocent or oblivious; she is unaware of the lion, unaware of the dangers, her body is in the desert but her spirit dreams and travels far away… No matter the interpretation, I simply love the painting and I take delight in its mystical, poetic aura.

To end, here are some verses from Lorca’s poem “And After”:

The heart,
fountain of desire,
dissolves.

(Only desert remains.)
The illusion of dawn
and kisses dissolve.

Only desert
Remains.
Undulating desert.