Henri Rousseau - The Dream / Le Reve Teddy Bear

The Dream (Le Rêve), painted in 1910 in oil on canvas by French Naïve artist Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier, depicts a reclining woman identified by Rousseau as Yadwigha, traditionally associated with a Polish love from his youth, lying on a red sofa in an improbable moonlit jungle. Rousseau explained the scene through a poem in which Yadwigha dreams she has been transported into the forest while listening to the music of an enchanter half-hidden in the foliage. Rousseau never visited a tropical jungle; he constructed these imaginary worlds from Paris botanical gardens and zoos, museums, popular imagery and his own imagination. Exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants only months before his death, The Dream was his final and largest jungle painting, an enigmatic fusion of reality and fantasy whose Naïve style later fascinated Surrealist artists.