In his job as customs man, Rousseau appraised 
curiosities from everywhere, learning in the process 
about cultures he never otherwise experienced. 
Except in the halls of a museum, he had not explored 
the ruins of the ancient world or trekked a jungle, 
yet he absorbed these wonders from the pages 
of encyclopedias, studied all the shades and shapes 
of green in botanical gardens, observed exotic beasts 
behind the bars of cages at the zoo. 

He made note of all this in his paintings, where ancient 
Egyptian lotuses rise like fans over a European odalisque, 
with her companion brace of lionesses, diminutive shy 
elephant, a world lit from within by imagination’s light. 
The eye follows the divan’s curved line, hand extended 
to the crouched lions, angled end of a snake, all in the same 
sinuous curve. Bright fruit hangs overhead. The woman 
is at once Eve and the Egyptian goddess Hathor—consort 
of the Sun God—muse, creator, and destroyer, bridge 
to other worlds. She’s a hieroglyph, encoding whole 
cosmologies, aesthetics. In the center of the frame, 
yet still somehow invisible, a green-faced guard fades 
into leafy shadows, serenades her in this monument 
to colonial collections with a kind of flute. 

The Dream (Le Rêve), 1910

This oil-on-canvas painting by French post-Impressionist painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) was his last completed work and is held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The reproduction above was downloaded from the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Bio: Robbi Nester