Most famous French paintings owe their fame to Paris, where careers were made from the 1640s to the 1890s. In 1648, the crown backed a Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture that ranked subjects by prestige. Its exhibition, the Salon, largely decided which new pictures the public saw and the state bought.
In the 1800s, some painters went around the Salon through dealers and shows of their own. So each story below asks how Paris first received the picture.
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How These Were Chosen
Each painter appears once. Each was judged by the French state, its Academy or the Salon jury, or shown at an exhibition artists set up outside the Salon.
The countdown runs backward from 1897 to the 1630s. I stopped in the late 1890s, when rival salons were taking over from the official one.
12. Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy (1897)
A woman in a striped robe lies asleep on the sand under a full moon. A lion has stopped over her, its tail raised and its nose close to her head. Beside her lie a mandolin and a clay water jar.
Henri Rousseau taught himself to paint, far from the state art schools. He painted this canvas in 1897. By then he had left his job with the city of Paris to paint full time.
Her hand is the most moving thing in the scene. Even asleep, she hasn't let go of her walking stick.
That job explains his nickname, le Douanier. The word means customs officer, which he never was. For twenty two years Rousseau worked for the octroi de Paris, the office that taxed goods entering the city.
His contemporaries assumed he had seen jungles and deserts as a soldier in Mexico. Rousseau himself later alluded to the French campaign there, as if he had taken part.
In 1910, the year of his death, he admitted he had never left France. He had studied stuffed animals at the Jardin des Plantes, the botanical garden of Paris.
He showed the canvas at the Salon des Indépendants of 1897. Unlike the official Salon, this show had no jury and gave no prizes. Rousseau still wanted the approval of the state.
He wrote to officials and asked them to buy his canvases. In those letters he called himself a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme, a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. Gérôme had given him only a few pieces of advice.
In 1898 he offered the painting to the mayor of Laval, the town in western France where he was born. He asked between 1,800 and 2,000 francs. In the letter he described the picture himself.
A wandering mandolin player has fallen into a deep sleep, her jar of drinking water beside her. A lion happens to pass, catches her scent and does not devour her.
"There is a moonlight effect, very poetic," he added. Laval did not buy it.
The canvas then disappeared from public view. In early 1924 the art critic Louis Vauxcelles found it with a Paris charcoal merchant. By February it belonged to John Quinn, a New York lawyer and collector of modern art.
Quinn died that summer. At the auction of his collection in Paris in 1926, The Sleeping Gypsy fetched 525,000 francs.
At a Glance
Artist: Henri Rousseau (1844 to 1910)
Painted: 1897
Medium: Oil on canvas
Where to see it: Museum of Modern Art, New York
About This Painting
How big is The Sleeping Gypsy?
The Sleeping Gypsy measures 129.5 by 200.7 centimeters, about 51 inches high and 6 feet 7 inches wide.
How did The Sleeping Gypsy reach MoMA?
The Sleeping Gypsy came to MoMA as a gift from Mrs. Simon Guggenheim. She acquired it in December 1939 from a Swiss collector in Küssnacht, near Lucerne.
Has The Sleeping Gypsy been restored?
Yes. MoMA's conservator Michael Duffy treated The Sleeping Gypsy in 2019, while the museum was closed for renovation. He removed nearly a century of discolored varnish.
Where is Henri Rousseau buried?
Henri Rousseau is buried in Laval, his home town. His remains were transferred there in 1947, to the Parc de la Perrine.
11. Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884 to 1886)
Parisians of every age spend a Sunday on a sunny riverbank. A woman at the water's edge holds a fishing rod.
On the right, a woman in a bustle walks a small monkey on a leash. A man in a top hat stands beside her.
The painter, Georges Seurat, was twenty four when he began. He worked on the canvas from 1884 to 1886. The riverbank is La Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine just outside Paris.