The Sleeping Gypsy

Under a still, moonlit sky a lion stands over a sleeping figure in a striped robe, sniffing at the dreamer who lies beside a mandolin and a jar in a barren desert. Henri Rousseau, the untaught customs officer, paints the strange scene with flat color, crisp outline, and an eerie, dreamlike calm in which the lion neither threatens nor wakes the sleeper. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, the Sleeping Gypsy is his enigmatic masterpiece - a hypnotic, poetic vision, utterly original, that seems to anticipate the dream-worlds of Surrealism decades before its time.