[MUSIC] Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy of 1897 is a fantastic and deeply mysterious work. In both The Dream and The Sleeping Gypsy, Rousseau explores similar themes. A recumbent female figure occupies the focal point. She's part of an exotic landscape. She exists in harmony with the animal world, and the full moon rises high in the sky. In both paintings, there is a dark-skinned musician. The themes of the two paintings are similar but the images and their relationship to each other are very different. How do they differ? The gypsy is a wanderer. She carries a staff, a pitcher of water, a musical instrument. The original title in French, the Sleeping Bohemian, suggests she's an artist and an outsider, one who is set apart from conventional society. She is perhaps an outsider like Rousseau himself, who was not accepted by the conventional art world, though many artists from the Avant-Garde period recognised the importance of Rousseau's work, including Gauguin and Picasso. It's said that when Gauguin visited the exhibition where Rousseau's self portrait was hung, he exclaimed, ‘now that is a painting! It is the only thing that can be looked at here.’ Why did Rousseau say this about his own painting? In the hope of trying to sell The Sleeping Gypsy, Rousseau wrote a letter to the mayor of his hometown Laval, in which he offered the following description of his now famous masterpiece. He said, a wandering Negress, a mandolin player, sleeps in deep exhaustion, her jug beside her. A lion happens to pass that way, and sniffs at her, but does not devour her. The scene takes place in a completely dry desert. The gypsy is dressed in oriental fashion. The Sleeping Gypsy reveals Rousseau's unique style. His use of brushwork to create a smooth finish rather than a textured look, his flat surfaces and his brilliant, arresting colours. What do we actually make of the sleeping gypsy herself? Perhaps she's dreaming of the lion and the river as the French poet, writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau suggested. Indeed, perhaps, the lion and the river are the sleeping gypsy's dreams. What peace. The mystery believes in itself alone and stands quite naked. The gypsy sleeps. Her eyes barely closed can depict this motionless, flowing face, this river of forgetfulness. The Sleeping Gypsy is deeply enigmatic, mysterious, puzzling. Who is she? Where has the lion come from in this still desert? Why doesn't the beast attack its prey? The various motifs in the painting draw on classical myth. Perhaps, she's a female Oedipus. She's wandering, she carries a staff. Oedipus had a lame foot. She encounters a lion. Oedipus encountered the woman lion, that is the Sphinx. Perhaps, she's also a Sphinx, a keeper of mysteries. There's certainly a sense of enigma. Like Orpheus, she is a musician. Orpheus is said to have played such beautiful music he even tamed wild beasts. Is it important that the painting should have a rational meaning? If we study the painting carefully, we can see the various images rhyme with each other. The circular base of the mandolin evokes the moon. Light falls on both. The lion's tail, held erect, suggests her wooden staff or stick lying by her side. The wavy lines of the beast's mane evoke the lines of the woman's hair. The very bare foreground is mirrored by the bare background. The two plains divided by softly drawn mountains and a strip of water. Is this the River of Lethe, or forgetfulness? Both the woman and lion are separated from the mountains by the river. The gypsy's brightly coloured striped robe enhances the beauty of the scene. The painting's rich colours and rhyming shapes and forms, as well as it's bare landscape, give it a strange beauty and sense of stillness. What do you think the overall effect of the painting is in relation to the senses? The lion evokes animal sensuality, the sleeping women with her mandolin evokes music and pleasure. The full moon complements these motifs by creating an overall sense of the romantic. But here, romanticism is edged with strangeness. All of these features combine to emphasise the poetic quality of the work. The painting takes us back perhaps to a far distant, imaginary time, long before the modern period, when human and animal lived in relative peace in the natural world and shared common spaces. In 1887, there was much discussion of Darwin's writings on human and animal. Particularly, his argument that humans and animals have more in common than previously thought, that both experience a similar range of feelings and emotions. Rousseau certainly gave a sense of communal feeling between the women and animal in his paintings, as if they were connected by an invisible bond. You will have observed the stillness of the painting. The figures of the standing lion and sleeping gypsy are almost sculptural. Nothing moves. There's a strange lack of motion in Rousseau's paintings that makes us feel we are actually there, witnessing a moment captured in time. Or more specifically a moment in the mind of the artist. As we've seen in our discussion of The Dream, Rousseau again brings together images which are very different in a bold and commanding manner. A sleeping gypsy, a wandering lion, a moonlit desert. In this way, The Sleeping Gypsy anticipates the Surrealist's approach of juxtapositioning unexpected objects, animals and people, in unfamiliar ways to create a sense of the marvellous. They argued that this juxtaposition of the strange and unfamiliar would free up the viewer's mind, release him or her from the everyday, and create a new space for imagining new and different possibilities and relationships. In this way, Rousseau anticipated the Surrealist's interest in the marvellous, something both strange and beautiful. The marvellous was also disorienting. It gave the viewer a shock because it opened a new doorway into the normality and the real. Breton, in the 1920s, described Rousseau's painting as before their time and as totally Surrealist in inspiration. Rosseau's paintings relate to the Orientalism of the period, invoking a fascination with otherness, particularly in relation to the lands and peoples of the colonial empires, from North Africa and the Middle East. Artists painted the palaces, harems, ornaments and colours of these lands. Focus was often on erotic excess. Rousseau, however, was not so interested in these themes. Rather, he was fascinated by the tropical jungles, the fruits, flowers, plants, and animals. The Sleeping Gypsy is an Orientalist picture but of it's own kind. It's not about harems and pashas. Rousseau has created a poetic Orientalist landscape occupied by an Oriental figure. The Sleeping Gypsy is also a musician. Rousseau frequently includes the mysterious dark figure of the musician in his paintings. He himself loved music and played the violin. What are we to make of the musician? Perhaps, this figure is Rousseau's alter ego, the musician he might become if he were to appear in his own poetic dreamscapes. Much has been said of Rousseau's poetic genius but perhaps, Cocteau has made the most compelling statement. Cocteau said of The Sleeping Gypsy that it was not poetic painting but rather painted poetry. Henri Rousseau drew on many artistic styles including the sublime. The Sleeping Gypsy's sublime in that there's a strong sense of boundlessness in relation to the landscape. Boundlessness is a feature which Immanuel Kant said was a characteristic of the sublime. There's a sense of an endless desert and deep stillness and solitude. Yet, there's also a sense of great beauty in the overall composition. The beauty of a sublime landscape. The Sleeping Gypsy's also surreal. The painting represents a strange juxtaposition of objects, human and animal. The image of the gypsy asleep in the desert is exceedingly strange. She lies in a deep sleep, although her eyes are slightly open, as if she might also be in a trance or seeing in her sleep. She wears a beautifully striped robe with a white frill around the collar. She's made this place her own, set out her few possessions on the ground, her jug, mandolin, and blanket. It is as if she's a pilgrim. The very bareness of the landscape itself suggests a dreamscape, a scene that is central to Surrealist painting. The Surrealists placed a great deal of emphasis on the freedom of the imagination and the importance of desire. In his ability to explore the imagination, to set his imagination free, Rousseau anticipated a central feature of the Surrealist movement, which came into its own in Paris in the 1920s. In The Sleeping Gypsy, Rousseau not only sets his own imagination free but he also shows us a woman, living and traveling freely according to her own desires. The Surrealists believe desire was a very personal thing. It was the true voice of the inner self. According to Andre Breton, considered the founder of the Surrealist movement, desire is the sole motivating principle of the world. The Surrealists also believed that in art, desire might be invoked in the beholder by the juxtaposition of unusual objects. Strange things could arouse desire, a sense of arousal, or even longing. To me, The Sleeping Gypsy, the woman, the lion, the full moon, arouses a desire for a free life. The freedom to wander, to find one's inner self. I think that the unusual theme about the painting is that Rousseau creates this desire in a woman, a black woman, an outsider, an artist. The painting has a strange beauty and evokes a desire to roam free from the restrictions of contemporary urban life. This woman lives in all of us. She represents an inner deep seated human longing to live a life that is true to one's self. What is most unusual is that while the gypsy is by definition an artist, a bohemian and an outsider, in this painting, the gypsy is also female. I can't think of another example in the history of art of a woman painted in such an unusual context. She's independent, alone, traveling on her own terms. One might imagine a woman alone might find herself the object of sexual threats but nothing of this nature is suggested. Rousseau does not sexualise her at all in this way. Rather, she's simply beautiful in her own right. She's a wanderer, living her own life, a strange exotic being. In this way, Rousseau certainly goes against the grain. Traditionally, black women in the history of art are not represented as subjects in their own right. The sleeping gypsy appears to live in harmony with nature. The lion looks as if it has wandered into the scene and come across the gypsy unexpectedly. The great beast casts a glance in her direction, as if not quite sure about her presence but also careful not to disturb her. There is, however, a sense in which the painting is gendered. The lion, by virtue of its flowing mane, is a male, the gypsy female. If Rousseau had painted the gypsy as a man, it would have created a very different meaning. The gypsy and the lion seem to share a communal bond. The male lion is not just present, it seems also to be protecting her, so that she can have the freedom not just to sleep but also to dream. Rousseau's mysterious painting also reminds me of aspects of the ancient story of Mary of Egypt. We know that Rousseau sometimes absorbed religious figures into his works, as we saw with Yadwigha who recalls Eve from the Garden of Eden. He also painted a work called Eve. Mary of Egypt is the patron saint of penitents, particularly in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches, as well as the Catholic church. She was born in Egypt and lived by begging and spinning flax. She also lived a sexually dissolute life. After a religious conversion, Mary spent the rest of her life wandering the deserts and living as a recluse. She befriended a religious man on her journeys, Saint Zosimas whom she met a number of times. It's said she experienced spiritual ecstasy with the saint. He gave her his mantle to cover her naked body and she told him her life story. On another occasion, she walked across the surface of the River Jordan to meet him. He gave her communion, left, and she apparently died. He found her 20 days later in a different place. She had been miraculously transported there and her body preserved. He tried to bury her but the soil was too hard. Suddenly, he noticed a magnificent lion standing by her body, licking her feet. The lion dug a deep grave in the hard ground and Saint Zosimas buried her there. The lion then departed. Religious images of Mary represent her as an older woman with a deeply tanned skin and accompanied by a lion. So it's possible that Rousseau absorbed elements of the story of Mary of Egypt into his painting. A woman traveling alone in the desert, her dark skin, the guardian lion, the river in the distance, possibly the River Jordan. She lies on the bare ground as if asleep but her eyes are partly open, as if she's in a spiritual trance or perhaps she's experiencing religious ecstasy, another important area of desire. Perhaps, this is the scene of her death. These repeated images from the religious story are very powerful. Is Rousseau's bohemian Mary of Egypt? I believe so. The final persuasive reason is that Mary of Egypt is sometimes called, the dusky saint, or gypsy Mary. Gypsy is derived from Egyptian. What do you think? So, in these two paintings, we can see that Rousseau has gone completely against the grain in his depiction of these two women. The Yadwigha figure who refers to Eve is on her red couch in the midst of the jungle in an act of creation. The Sleeping Gypsy, who we now think is Mary of Egypt, is a lone figure. She's wandered for many, many years across the deserts on her own, doing penance but she appears to be a very strong figure. She sleeps, perhaps she's dreaming, there's almost a look of ecstasy on her face, which suggests an inner strength and an inner depth. So she too has been transformed into an active figure and the subject of her own painting. So what is remarkable about Rousseau's vision of these two women is that he creates them as independent women, and this goes very much against the tradition of the representation of women in art history. [MUSIC]
