Henri Rousseau - The Sleeping Gypsy Teddy Bear

The Sleeping Gypsy / La Bohémienne endormie, painted in 1897 in oil on canvas by French Naïve artist Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier, is an enigmatic moonlit desert scene that Rousseau himself described in unusually specific terms. He wrote of a wandering mandolin player overcome by fatigue, sleeping beside a jar of drinking water while a lion catches her scent but does not attack. Rousseau called the figure a bohémienne, and the North African setting reflects 19th-century French ideas about Romani origins rather than an ethnographic study. Exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1897, the painting turns those disparate elements into a dreamlike encounter whose flattened forms, sharp outlines and improbable calm later fascinated the avant-garde.