La gitana dormida

Henri Rousseau painted this in 1897 while working as a Paris toll collector, self-taught and largely laughed at by the trained artists around him. He thought it good enough to sell to his hometown, Laval, and wrote to the mayor in 1898 offering it. The mayor said no. What Rousseau described in that letter is exactly what you see. A wandering woman, a mandolin player, has fallen asleep in the desert with her instrument and a water jar beside her, and a lion has come across her in the moonlight, caught her scent, and, in his words, does not devour her. Everything is held perfectly still. The moon is full, the stripes of her robe are as flat and clean as a flag, and the lion stands frozen with its tail out straight. There is no real depth, no shadow where a shadow should fall, and that stillness is why the Surrealists later claimed him as one of their own. It hangs now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, given by Olga Guggenheim in 1939.