The Dream

A nude woman reclines on a plush red sofa improbably set deep in a moonlit jungle, surrounded by lions, exotic birds, lotus blooms, and a dark snake charmer piping in the foliage. Henri Rousseau painted this enormous, hypnotic scene in the last year of his life, explaining that the woman, asleep, is dreaming herself into the jungle. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, the Dream is his masterpiece - the supreme flowering of his imagined wilderness, meticulous and magical, a vision of paradise that seems to anticipate the dream-logic of Surrealism.