Rousseau and his Parisian contemporaries were fascinated by wandering gypsies, the Romany people known in France as bohémiens: men and women exiled to the fringes of society during the dramatic changes of the mid-nineteenth century. French writers and artists had historically linked the Romany to Egypt as well as Bohemia, which may explain Rousseau’s depiction of a dark-skinned woman sleeping calmly—despite the large lion sniffing at her shoulder—in an arid landscape. With its flat planes of pure color, simple geometric forms, dreamlike atmosphere, and exotic subject, The Sleeping Gypsy at once conjures a desire for a preindustrial past and asserts its status as a new kind of modern art; the details of the lion’s unnerving eye and the figure’s zipperlike teeth evidence the artist’s singular pictorial imagination.

Rousseau, a toll collector for the city of Paris (thus known also as Le Douanier), was largely self-taught, although he had grand ambitions of entering the Académie Française. Denied the official acceptance he craved, he later became a hero, although somewhat unwittingly, to the early-twentieth-century avant-garde painters, who claimed him as one of their own.

Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)