THE SLEEPING GYPSY
HENRI ROUSSEAU, 1897
So... a lion. Standing over a sleeping woman in the middle of the desert. And he's not attacking her. He's sniffing her. Like he's trying to work out what she is. A musician, dead asleep, her mandolin by her hand. Nothing happens. Not a drop of blood. The calmest almost-death you'll ever see. He called it The Sleeping Gypsy. Every detail in it is a little bit wrong. The woman's flat. The lion looks like a toy. The moon's pasted on. By every rule they teach in art school, it's a disaster. And Rousseau painted it dead serious and called it realism. He also thought he belonged in the Louvre. Hold that thought. He was self-taught. A toll collector at the edge of Paris. So they called him Le Douanier. The customs officer. A little dig at the amateur that stuck so hard it became his name. The customs officer. He never went to Africa, never saw a desert. The lion he copied from stuffed ones at the museum. The rest he invented. Critics laughed. His own hometown turned it down for being childish. Then it vanished. But while he was alive, one person had already decided he was a genius. Picasso. In 1908 he throws Rousseau a banquet. Rousseau shows up, plays his violin, and tells him, we are the two greatest painters alive. You in the Egyptian style. Me in the modern. An unbelievable thing to say to Pablo Picasso. And the best part is, he meant it. He died two years later. This painting didn't surface again until the 1920s, long after he was gone. So look at the lion again. His eye isn't even on her. He's staring at nothing, like he forgot why he walked over. He still hasn't decided. That's the painting.