A sleeper cannot look back at the painter, which is one reason painters have watched people asleep for centuries. Some of these pictures have lived stranger lives than their sleepers. A canvas turned up boxed in above a London chimney, and X rays found a man hidden under the paint of another. Twelve people asleep, and what went on around them while their eyes were shut.
Sleep is the subject of the picture, not a detail in the corner.
The picture ranks among its painter's best known works.
It set a pattern that later artists copied.
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Sleep gives a painter what no waking model can, a person who has stopped posing. The eyes are closed, so the figure cannot look back. The body goes slack and falls into poses nobody holds on purpose, and it can be watched for as long as the painter likes.
That slack body lets a picture say two things at once. A sleeper looks like the dead, so sleep has stood in for death since the Greeks. A sleeper also looks like someone waiting to be found, so it has stood in for desire.
On this list the figure at the center is really asleep, and the sleep is what the picture is about, whether it speaks of death, desire, idleness or fear. The countdown runs from twelve to one.
12. John William Waterhouse, Sleep and His Half-Brother Death (1874)
Two young men lie side by side on a couch in a shadowed classical room, both with their eyes closed. The one in front lies in full light, his head dropped to one side and poppies in his hand. The one behind lies in shadow, his head thrown back.
It was the first painting John William Waterhouse sent to the Royal Academy summer exhibition, in 1874, when he was 25, and it was accepted. He called it Sleep and His Half-Brother Death.
The two brothers come from Greek poetry. Hesiod's Theogony counts Hypnos, Sleep, and Thanatos, Death, among the children of Night. Homer calls them twins, and in the Iliad they carry home to Lycia the body of Sarpedon, a son of Zeus killed at Troy.
Twins set Waterhouse a hard problem. His two young men are the same age, equally handsome and equally still, and nothing in either body tells which stillness is going to end.
So the painter tells them apart with objects. Hypnos holds the poppies that were his attribute in antiquity, and a pair of pipes lies below his feet. An antique lyre sits in the dark on the side of Death. There is an instrument for each brother, and nobody awake to play either one.
The debut opened the Academy to Waterhouse. He showed there almost every year afterward, became a full Academician in 1895 and kept returning to people who are not in charge of what happens to them, drifting, enchanted, drugged or asleep.
At a Glance
Artist: John William Waterhouse (1849 to 1917)
Painted: 1874, shown at the Royal Academy summer exhibition that year
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: About 70 × 91 cm (27.5 × 36 in)
Where to see it: Private collection, not on public view
11. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Land of Cockaigne (1567)
Nobody has cleared the round table, and under it three men sleep on their backs around the trunk of a tree, heads in and feet out like the spokes of a wheel. They are not the strangest thing in the picture. A few steps away, a half eaten egg is walking off on two little legs, a spoon still stuck in its shell.