---
title: "Dreamlike painting: how artists invent a world"
description: "What makes a painting dreamlike? Rousseau's sofa and an animal encounter by Chico da Silva distinguish a narrated dream from visual strangeness."
canonical: https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/dreamlike-painting/
lang: en
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
translations:
  en: https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/dreamlike-painting/
  fr: https://chicodasilva.org/fr/articles/peinture-onirique/
  pt: https://chicodasilva.org/pt/artigos/pintura-onirica/
---

Art and artists

# Dreamlike painting: how artists invent a world

What makes a painting dreamlike? Rousseau's sofa and an animal encounter by Chico da Silva distinguish a narrated dream from visual strangeness.

The sofa in Henri Rousseau’s *The Dream* is a substantial piece of furniture, with a curved back and dark upholstery. We could recognise it in a sitting room. Here it stands in a jungle: leaves reach its edges, enormous flowers surround the reclining woman, and two lions peer through the vegetation. The most familiar object in the scene is also the most displaced. The difficulty begins here: everything is clear enough to recognise, although the whole lies outside everyday experience.

Calling a painting dreamlike often names this feeling of strangeness. The word can refer to an account of a dream, as it does with Rousseau, or to an impression formed by the viewer. Distinguishing the two helps us see more. A painter can tell us what a figure dreams; a composition can itself unsettle our certainty about where we are. To understand the difference, it is worth staying with the sofa before looking for hidden symbols.

## Where the dream takes place

![A woman reclines on a sofa among huge flowers and leaves; lions and a musician appear in the moonlit jungle.](https://chicodasilva.org/editorial/henri-rousseau/the-dream-1280.jpg)

*Henri Rousseau. The Dream, 1910. Oil on canvas, 204.5 × 298.5 cm.

Henri Rousseau. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 252.1954. Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller. Reproduction: MoMA; photographer not identified in the record. [Museum record](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79277).*

The woman occupies much of the left half of the canvas. Her extended arm follows the back of the sofa and points towards the area where the musician appears. She has room to recline; around her, the jungle closes in successive barriers. Foreground leaves conceal the base of the furniture. Others rise behind it, while animals emerge through narrow openings. The sofa is installed in the forest with a solidity that makes its presence stranger still.

Rousseau explained the scene: the sleeping woman dreams that she has been carried into a forest, where she hears an enchanter’s instrument. MoMA reproduces the painter’s comment.[^dream] There is, then, a clue to the narrative. The woman and the place reached in sleep appear together, with no frame separating the dreamer from her dream.

This clue explains the encounter while leaving the visual experience intact. The extended arm, the muzzles turned towards us and the band of colour on the musician’s clothing continue to compete for attention. Leaves have edges as definite as the woman’s body. A plant in the distance can insist on its presence as sharply as one close to us. Overlap creates distance, while clarity compresses it.

There is also a difference between what the picture shows and what it asks us to imagine. We see the musician holding the instrument to his mouth; no sound reaches us. The woman’s arm guides our gaze towards him, and the painter’s comment invites us to hear the music in our minds. The whole jungle seems suspended in listening. The stillness of the animals permits both calm and watchfulness: the lions’ open eyes keep the scene from coming fully to rest.

This tension gives the dream duration. Understanding Rousseau’s explanation takes a moment. Following the breaks in the green, finding a face among the stems and returning to the woman takes longer.

## An adjective and a historical movement

*The Dream* dates from 1910. In 1924 André Breton published the first *Manifesto of Surrealism*, proposing psychic automatism and access to thought outside rational control. MoMA’s historical introduction locates the movement’s programme there.[^surrealism] The interval between the dates helps us use the terms precisely: Rousseau painted this forest before the Surrealist formulation.

“Dreamlike” can describe an effect produced by an image. “Surrealism” names a history of artists, writings and procedures. A painting of invented animals can feel strange without that determining its place in a movement. Equally, knowing that an artist took part in Surrealism still leaves us to examine how each image works with dreams.

The distinction becomes useful when we ask exactly what feels dreamlike. With Rousseau, there is an account by the painter and an unlikely coexistence of objects. In another work it may be the absence of a stable measure, or the impossibility of placing the figures in a setting. These questions take us beyond the adjective and back to the painting.

## Chico da Silva’s blue without a location

[![A large fantastic insect attacking a smaller insect on a blue ground. Fantastic Animals, Chico da Silva, 1978, acrylic on canvas.](https://img.chicodasilva.org/jcc-028/chico-da-silva-fantastic-animals-1978-acrylic-on-canvas-42x60cm-joao-cunha-collection-jcc-028-chicodasilva.org-1280.jpg)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/fantastic-animals-1978-028/)

*[Fantastic Animals (1978)](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/fantastic-animals-1978-028/), Chico da Silva João Cunha Collection.*

In *Fantastic Animals*, painted in 1978, Chico da Silva dispenses with the vegetation that helped orient us in Rousseau. A large creature bends towards a small insect; blue fills the whole interval around them. No line separates earth and sky. The animal’s long limbs end in spreading fingers, yet no ground is drawn beneath them. We can follow its body confidently and still be unable to say where it is.

The difference in size suggests a possible action. The insect is close to the muzzle and looks small enough to fit into one of the larger creature’s hands. Its two grey wings open upwards, while long red and blue forms extend from the other animal’s head. At a distance these projections also resemble wings or leaves. Repeated shapes bring together bodies that scale holds apart.

Blue passes between the legs and beneath the belly. Instead of providing a succession of planes, it keeps both creatures exposed at once. We have no jungle to cross before finding the smaller one. The strangeness lies in their proximity: an enormous creature bends down to a being we might otherwise overlook, and their meeting fills almost the whole canvas.

Space and scale make a dreamlike reading possible; that reading is ours. The title and object record supply no dream narrated by Chico.[^animals] Keeping this distinction leaves other readings open. The scene can also resemble a curious encounter, a threat or a conversation between animals. The muzzle approaches the insect’s forelegs without completing the gesture. Each reading finds support in that small blue interval.

## The forest assembled in Paris

![Five monkeys appear among overlapping green leaves, white and orange flowers, and red foliage.](https://chicodasilva.org/editorial/henri-rousseau/tropical-forest-monkeys-1280.jpg)

*Henri Rousseau. Tropical Forest with Monkeys, 1910. Oil on canvas, 129.5 × 162.5 cm.

Henri Rousseau. National Gallery of Art, Washington, John Hay Whitney Collection, 1982.76.7. Reproduction: NGA; photographer not identified in the record. [Museum record](https://www.nga.gov/artworks/61253-tropical-forest-monkeys).*

Rousseau’s other forest helps test the reach of the word. In *Tropical Forest with Monkeys*, also painted in 1910, no sofa announces an object out of place. There are monkeys, leaves and flowers. Strangeness grows from relationships between things that could inhabit the same landscape.

The leaves grow large enough to resemble curtains. The dark monkey to the left of centre looks out of the picture; orange monkeys hang from branches above. There is a pale sky and trees fading into the distance, but foreground plants close the passages. The eye searches for an opening and meets leaves again. The landscape promises depth and delivers a sequence of surfaces.

The National Gallery of Art records Rousseau’s Parisian sources: botanical gardens, the zoo and printed images. The painter never left France.[^monkeys] This changes our relation to the forest. Elements seen in different places have been brought together in a space that painting alone makes continuous. Invention begins in their assembly, even when each plant looks as though it was studied separately.

The picture also resists the idea that a dreamlike painting must show something impossible. Almost everything can be named; the sensation comes from the scale of the leaves, the number of closing planes and the persistence of eyes that meet ours. While we search for a route into the jungle, the monkeys have already seen us. The place seems to exist on its own, and we are the ones who have yet to find a way in.

[^dream]: The Museum of Modern Art, [*Henri Rousseau, The Dream*](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79277), record 252.1954, object data and the painter’s comment reproduced in the 2021 gallery label.

[^surrealism]: MoMA Learning, [*Surrealism*](https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/flattened_pages/moma_learning/themes/surrealism/), historical introduction and definition of automatism in the 1924 manifesto.

[^animals]: João Cunha Collection, [*Fantastic Animals*, jcc-028](https://chicodasilva.org/en/paintings/fantastic-animals-1978-028/), acrylic on canvas, 42 × 60 cm, 1978. The spatial reading comes from the reproduction.

[^monkeys]: National Gallery of Art, [*Tropical Forest with Monkeys*](https://www.nga.gov/artworks/61253-tropical-forest-monkeys), record 1982.76.7, technical data and sources used in assembling the jungles.

## Related reading

-   [Henri Rousseau: jungles imagined in Paris](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/henri-rousseau-paintings/)
-   [Primitive, Naïve, Indigenous](https://chicodasilva.org/en/articles/primitive-naif-indigenous/)