A groundbreaking exhibition at the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris is exploring one of humanity's most fundamental experiences through the lens of art history. "The Empire of Sleep" brings together works by masters including Monet, Picasso, and Goya to examine how artists have depicted sleep, dreams, and their mythological significance across centuries.
Sleep, which occupies nearly a third of our lives, has fascinated humanity for millennia. According to Greek mythology, the god Hypnos, son of Night, induces sleep with a flutter of wings or by pouring poppy juice, whose psychotropic properties have been known since ancient times. This is beautifully illustrated in Evelyn De Morgan's painting featured in the exhibition. Hypnos's son Morpheus then plunges us into the world of dreams, while hopefully his twin brother Thanatos, the personification of death, does not visit the sleeper.
The earliest representations of sleep in art appeared on ancient Greek vases around the 5th century BCE, closely tied to mythology. Sleep became prominent in Christian iconography through numerous biblical episodes, from the creation of Eve from Adam's rib while he slept under divine anesthesia, to Noah's drunken slumber that exposed his genitals and led to his son Ham's curse. Even more dangerous was Holofernes' sleep, also caused by excessive drinking, which cost him his head to Judith's sword. This theme enjoyed great popularity in European painting during the 16th and 17th centuries.
With the New Testament, the relationship between sleep and death began to reverse, with death seen merely as a sleep from which one awakens through resurrection. The episode of Jairus's daughter, miraculously "awakened" by Jesus, has been depicted in numerous artworks through the late 20th century, including Gabriel von Max's "The Resurrection of Jairus's Daughter" (1878).
Often represented from the Renaissance onward, the gentle theme of the sleeping Christ child more or less explicitly associates death and sleep. Sometimes only the gravity of the Virgin watching over the child suggests the coming sacrifice. Occasionally, the premonition of crucifixion is clearly expressed. No one drives the point home more forcefully than Antonio Randa in 1640: he places the infant Jesus on a cross and uses a human skull as his little pillow. In the foreground, the instruments of torture stand out: crown of thorns, lance, hammer, nails, pincers, and even the dice used by soldiers who would争夺 Christ's tunic after his death.
"The Empire of Sleep" exhibition at the Marmottan Monet Museum focuses primarily on an extended 19th century, from the end of the Enlightenment to the 1920s, while also presenting ancient pieces and a beautiful collection of medieval illuminations and classical works. As scientific curator Laura Bossi, a neurologist and historian of science, notes, the richness of this theme seems inexhaustible. Don Quixote himself exclaimed, "Blessed be he who invented sleep!"
For painters and engravers, sleep is not just another theme, Bossi explains. There is a unique relationship between the artist and the sleeping model - unconscious, motionless, defenseless, surrendering and abandoning themselves during the pose in the closed space of the studio or bedroom. The artist's gaze upon their nude and unconscious model is not always chaste, as seen in Félix Vallotton's "Nude Woman in Armchair" (1897), nor is that of the artwork's viewer.
The contemplation of unconscious beauty, made more desirable by its defenselessness, has been one of the great themes in Western art history since the Renaissance. Greek mythology and ancient history offer numerous scholarly pretexts for undressing beautiful sleepers - Venus, Antiope (painted by Ingres), Ariadne abandoned by Theseus (Pompeii fresco), and sometimes beautiful sleeping men named Cupid, Endymion (G.F. Watts, 1903-1904), or Sarpedon, son of Zeus and Europa killed in the Trojan War. The scene of Sarpedon's abduction by Hypnos and Thanatos appears on numerous ancient vases.
Particularly favored since the Renaissance, the motif of the sleeping nymph surprised by a satyr allows artists to contrast the pulpy whiteness of the female body with the dark complexion of muscular satyrs. Returning to this theme in numerous drawings and prints, Picasso places his sleeping women at the mercy of sometimes a faun, sometimes a minotaur - beauty becomes easy prey for the beast. In Henri Gervex's famous 1878 painting inspired by Musset's poem "Rolla," the artist contrasts the clothed man with the nude sleeping young woman, echoing the scandal caused in 1863 by Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass" with its similar nude woman/clothed men contrast.
Fifteen years later, "Rolla" also caused scandal, not because of the exquisite nudity which, unlike Manet's paintings, transgressed no academic rules, but because of the young woman's clothes in the foreground. This "immoral" detail suggesting undressing identified the woman as a prostitute - a true lady doesn't remove everything.
While awaiting to provide scholars with an inexhaustible subject of study, dreams offer fertile ground for artists. "In Lorenzo Lotto's 'Sleeping Apollo' (circa 1549), it is when the sun god falls asleep that the muses dance," writes Laura Bossi. "The space of sleep and dreams thus appears as that of poetic and artistic creation." A thick grove separates the sleeper from the young divinities frolicking in nature. As an involuntary precursor to Manet, the artist gives this dream a very real connotation by representing the young women's clothes scattered at Apollo's feet.
Nineteenth-century artists imagined a very simple way to distinguish the real world from the universe of dreams on canvas: they painted the latter in grisaille (shades of gray). Scottish artist John Faed's "The Poet's Dream" (circa 1881-1882) provides a spectacular illustration. While the poet dozes, lying on a green hillock, the dreamlike vision rises toward the sky - a cliff with pearlescent reflections populated by countless figures. A similar device had been imagined by Ingres to illustrate "Ossian's Dream," featuring the 3rd-century Scottish bard.
From dream to nightmare, the step is taken with Johann Heinrich Füssli and his famous "The Nightmare" (1781, not exhibited). It shows a black incubus, dark as the devil, sitting on the stomach of a sleeping woman dressed in white. The frightening head of a horse appears in the background. These visions may have inspired a scene in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus." Fantasy cinema and its vampires owe them a great debt. As Goya had said, "The sleep of reason produces monsters!"
"The Empire of Sleep" runs at the Marmottan Monet Museum, located at 2 rue Louis-Boilly in Paris's 16th arrondissement, from October 9, 2025, to March 1, 2026. The exhibition demonstrates how this fundamental human experience has provided endless inspiration for artists across cultures and centuries, revealing the complex relationships between consciousness, vulnerability, creativity, and the eternal mysteries of sleep and dreams.
