
A few decades before the Surrealist artists began painting their dreamlike works, the artist Henri Rousseau was carefully crafting his own dreams, literally and figuratively. The Dream, a 1910 painting by the famous Post-Impressionist artist, represents not only a woman in awe at the wonders of the land she visits within a dream, but also Rousseau’s own personal dreams and goals as a painter. Since beginning his work, he dreamed of recognition, acceptance, and praise by other artists and art lovers, and found that he was faced with a difficult internal dilemma to achieve this aspiration. The Dream is Henri Rousseau’s work that best reflects his career-long internal struggle: to either conform to or mimic certain styles of painting in order to be accepted by the critical art world he so adored, or to allow himself to be creatively independent and unique, leaving his own path as he went.
Before one can analyze The Dream through this perspective, one must first be somewhat familiar with Rousseau’s biographical story. Henri Rousseau was born on May 21, 1844, in the town of Laval in northwest France. His father was a tinsmith and hardware dealer who “enjoyed bourgeois prosperity” (Shattuck 47). Growing up, he received no formal training in the arts; instead, he was employed until the age of forty working for France as a gabelou, or employee of the municipal toll service, although he received the misnomer sobriquet of douanier, a customs inspector (Shattuck 46). The death of his first wife, Clémence, which followed the deaths of eight infant children, left Rousseau with only one child, a daughter named Julia, and immense grief (Shattuck 49). He therefore hoped to take refuge in a new life and pursued painting to offer him comfort and fresh beginnings. Unlike contemporary colleagues of Rousseau who sentimentalize and romanticize the peasant in painting, he is essentially a folk painter and has the hopes and dreams of the average member of his class.
Rousseau’s obsession with being accepted by the art world is somewhat understandable when evaluated in context: as discussed, he was not only uneducated in the ways of formal painting and began his career at a much older age, but he was producing works at the same time as many other talented and better-known modern artists. Though working for many years already, Rousseau did not begin to receive proper recognition for his art until around the same time that Matisse had begun crafting a reputation as an artist. In the book Modern French Painters, author Jan Gordon asserts that the two, while technically competitors in the art arena, were different not only in style and subject matter but also their reasons for painting in the first place: “Matisse was a painter who conceived a terror of painting in a trite way, while Rousseau’s desire was to paint a picture so conventional that he would be admitted to the Artiste Français” (92).
