The Sleeping Gypsy

Henri Rousseau was a Parisian customs clerk who taught himself to paint at forty-nine. He never travelled outside France. The instrument beside the sleeping figure is a North African lute. Rousseau called it a 'mandolin' in his own writing about the painting; it isn't one. He could only have known the shape from a print or photograph. The whole canvas is a Sahara imagined from a Paris apartment. Picasso said it taught him how to be primitive on purpose. Now at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York @themuseumofmodernart