The Dream

Rousseau finished this in 1910, and he died that September, which makes it the last thing he completed. A naked woman reclines on a plush divan set impossibly in the middle of a jungle, lions watching, a snake curling through the leaves, a dark figure playing a pipe. The woman was Yadwigha, a Polish mistress from his youth in Paris. The strangest fact about this dense jungle is that Rousseau never saw one. He worked as a customs officer and rarely left the city. The plants come from the hothouses and the natural history collections of the Jardin des Plantes, drawn leaf by leaf and blown up to fill a canvas nearly ten feet wide. When people asked how a sofa came to be in the forest, he said the woman was asleep on it and dreaming herself there.