You probably know this painter better as the douanier Rousseau. He owes this nickname to his first job: he worked at the octroi office, where he controlled the entry of alcohol into Paris.

In "Le rêve", he depicts a luxuriant jungle, one of his favorite landscapes, with varied vegetation: oranges, bananas, lotus flowers... No fewer than 20 shades of green make up this painting. The jungle is populated by wild animals: two lions, a snake, birds and even an elephant... Can you find them all?

Well, Rousseau never traveled! The flora and fauna from which he drew his inspiration were not as wild as they seemed... The painter found his models in the Jardin des Plantes and its menagerie, as well as in the Jardin d'Acclimatation.

In this jungle is an unexpected object, a sofa, identical to Henri Rousseau's, on which a naked woman is resting, pointing... but at what? Not easy to spot, despite her colorful loincloth... Yet he is a major element of the painting, this black man playing music and seemingly charming the two lions. Unless he's charming the woman...

At top right, the moon reminds us that this is indeed a nocturnal dream. A dream of restored harmony between man and nature? Of a new Garden of Eden? The dream of the woman on the couch? Or the dream of the painter representing Yadwigha, his Polish muse?

This naïve painting, mocked for its somewhat childish features (Henri Rousseau was self-taught and never took painting lessons), foreshadows surrealism through the dream theme and the juxtaposition of incongruous elements.

In front of this immense painting (2.04 x 2.98 m), one of the largest and one of the last before the artist's death a few months later in 1910, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire said, "I don't think this year anyone will dare laugh."