Henri Rousseau was a French Post-Impressionist famed for his lushly painted jungle scenes. In his seminal work The Dream (1910), the artist merged elements of fantasy with a sensitive attention to form, composition, and color. Rousseau used a subtle palette of sage greens, earthen reds, and rich blacks, to produce interlocking forms that appear to emanate light from within. “A wandering Negress, a mandolin player, lies with her jar beside her, overcome by fatigue in a deep sleep. A lion chances to pass by, picks up her scent yet does not devour her,” Rousseau once described of his work The Sleeping Gypsy (1897). Born on May 21, 1844 in Laval, France, Rousseau led the majority of his life outside of the art world. Working as a toll collector on the outskirts of Paris, he taught himself to paint at home from observation and memory. One of his first exhibited works, Tiger in a Tropical Storm (1891), was shocking to audiences and critics alike at the Salon des Indépendants. The work abolished the rules of perspective and illusionistic space, while still working within the lexicon of representational imagery. Rousseau’s direct application of paint and mysterious subject matter, had a profound impact on the avant-garde artists of his day, including Wassily Kandinksy, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Max Beckmann. He died on September 2, 1910 in Paris, France. Today, Rousseau’s works are held in the collections of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the National Gallery in London, among others.