Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) famous Poster

“The Sleeping Gypsy” is an oil on canvas painting by French Naïve artist Henri Rousseau. It depicts a lion musing over a sleeping woman on a moonlit night. Rousseau and his Parisian contemporaries were fascinated by wandering gypsies, the Romany people known in France as bohémiens: men and women exiled to the fringes of society during the dramatic changes of the mid-nineteenth century. When he completed “The Sleeping Gypsy” in 1897, Rousseau offered to sell the painting to his hometown of Laval, 200 miles southwest of Paris. The offer was declined. It was not until 1924, 14 years after the artist’s death, that the work was rediscovered in a charcoal merchant’s shop in Paris—a less than ideal place to store an oil painting.