In 1898, Henri Rousseau sent a desperate letter to the mayor of Laval, the provincial French town where he was born. The former toll collector had recently painted a massive, six-foot-wide canvas depicting a mandolin player sleeping in a moonlit desert, and he wanted to offer it to Laval as a grand civic tribute.
"A wandering Negress, a mandolin player, lies with her jar beside her (a vase with drinking water), overcome by fatigue in a deep sleep," Rousseau wrote, spelling out the painting's surreal narrative for the local authorities. "A lion chances to pass by, picks up her scent yet does not devour her. There is a moonlight effect, very poetic."
He was completely convinced he had produced an academic masterpiece, an oil painting that belonged in a municipal museum. "I will let you have it for the sum of 200 to 300 francs," he pleaded.
The mayor of Laval turned him down.
To the town officials, the pioneer of naive art was an embarrassment and his flat, dreamlike painting of a lion sniffing a sleeper was simply childish. The rejection was absolute, and The Sleeping Gypsy did not enter a museum.
Instead, the painting disappeared into the gritty commerce of Paris. For decades, Rousseau's massive canvas ended up in the hands of an anonymous Parisian charcoal merchant. It hung in his working-class shop, accumulating soot and grime in an environment entirely hostile to fine art, while the official art world ignored it. It would eventually become a precursor to surrealism, but at the time it was just a dusty curiosity.
It stayed there until 1924, fourteen years after Rousseau died in poverty. That year, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles stumbled upon it in the charcoal shop and recognized the composition. The art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler purchased it out of the soot, and it eventually crossed the Atlantic to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it now hangs behind glass as one of the most protected masterpieces of the twentieth century.
0 comments