The mythology of sleep has been intrinsic to human narratives as early as biblical instances: Adam was asleep throughout Eve’s creation, Noah was disabled by catatonic drunkenness, Job suffered from insomnia throughout a disaster of religion, the apostles dozed within the Backyard of Olives. These episodes are all referenced within the exhibition “L’Empire du Sommeil” (or “The Empire of Sleep”), on view at Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris via March 1, 2026. The present spotlights sleep as a respite all through all phases of life, from the oblivion of newborns to the haunting specter of growing old and loss of life. Monet painted each ends—his child son Jean clutching a doll (1868) and his ailing spouse Camille enshrined in a white veil (1879) on the top of her bedridden struggling.
The exhibition textual content reminds viewers that sleep takes up a few third of our lives; given this vital consumption of hours, it deserves to be contemplated and studied. (Wrestling with being unaware consumed each Hamlet—“To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream”—and Ottessa Moshfegh’s anonymous narrator in her breakout 2018 novel My Yr of Relaxation and Rest.) Laura Bossi, a neurologist and science historian, curated the present alongside the museum’s director of collections, Sylvie Carlier, and curatorial assistant Anne-Sophie Luyton. “The sleeping mannequin is the best mannequin,” Bossi remarked, including that the artist can provide a “very tender look, making an attempt to protect a dwelling memento”—though “there may be at all times a form of ambiguity” within the ethics of that vulnerability.
Consistent with the main target of the museum’s collections, the exhibition, which includes 130 works, extends from the Enlightenment to the Nice Conflict with a smattering of historic and up to date works thrown in. One instance of the latter is the opening portray hung within the hallway as a prelude to the exhibition: Paula Rego’s illustration for Jean Rhys’ e book Vast Sargasso Sea. It was modeled on her circle of relatives reposing on a brightly lit veranda in view of cool blue waters in Portugal, previous the family’s final uprooting to England. In direction of the tip of the exhibition, Kiki Smith’s 2001 work Sleep Walker, a lady drawn on Nepalese paper, features a written element on the decrease edge: “she thought if she simply might hold her thoughts shifting via her stillness she might awaken.”
The exhibition in any other case largely sticks to works from the nineteenth Century. Its most serene depictions of sleep embody Michael Ancher’s La Sieste, its topic a lady resting alfresco on a bench amidst backyard greenery, hung toe-to-toe with Jean-Baptiste Chatigny’s younger man in repose on the base of a tree. Maybe nobody is as placid as the 2 portraits of pets—an etching of a snuggled canine by David Hockney and a pencil drawing of a comatose cat by Gwen John.
Moreover endearing: John Everett Millais’s portray of just a little lady who has nodded off in a pew throughout a sermon, her head tilting above her prim pink cape and fur muff. Max Beckmann’s 1918 etching of himself and his mates yawning, their mouths collectively open and fingers not fairly protecting the chasm of their oral cavities, is especially amusing. Louis-Léopold Boilly’s lithograph Le Songe de Tartini depicts Giuseppe Tartini making a pact with a horned and winged satan—perched on the tip of his mattress whereas he’s tucked in, in a white nightgown—to assist give you his greatest composition (The Satan’s Trill Sonata).
These droll moments, nevertheless, are offset by works depicting a sort of feverish limbo. In La Somnambule, an 1865 oil portray by Courbet, a younger lady’s direct gaze on the viewer belies her seemingly possessed and altered state. The oil portray Le Noctambule by Edvard Munch is a self-portrait during which the artist’s sunken eyes and concave posture evoke a zombie-like fitfulness, reflective of the artist’s troubles with sleeping and psychological well being alike. The stuporous ladies slumped over in a fin-de-siècle opium den in a portray by Gaetano Previati spotlight the hazard inherent in escapist intoxicants.
Extra disturbing are work that present sleep as a sort of desperation. Fernand Pelez’s portray encompasses a little one promoting violets on the street, too bodily exhausted to uphold himself in his commerce and slumbering in a doorway: “it’s one of many few work on this exhibition that takes into consideration a social critique,” Bossi said of this depiction of poverty and oppression. Edouard Vuillard’s La Berceuse, as soon as in Picasso’s assortment, isn’t of a lady cradling her child, because the title may point out in its allusion to a lullaby or soothing rocking movement. Fairly, it’s an older mom consoling her bedridden grownup daughter—proven faceless with chagrin—who has misplaced her little one in a miscarriage.
Extra excessive nonetheless are the unsettling depictions of loss of life, framed as “everlasting sleep,” be it Nadar’s eerie {photograph} of the deceased French author Victor Hugo (eyes closed and white beard and chest bathed in mild), Léon Cogniet’s Tête de jeune fille morte (her lips breathlessly, jarringly agog), or Ferdinand Hodler’s model-mistress Valentine Godé-Darel clenched in evident ache from most cancers (which the painter chronicled obsessively in a collection of 120 work).
A much less mortal angle mined within the exhibition is the inscrutability of the dream—the sheer enigma of the unconscious. “Goals are actually the material—the development—of our creativity,” Bossi famous. Within the nineteenth Century, the scientific research of desires debuted with the works of French scholar and doctor Alfred Maury (1861) and Marquis d’Hervey de Saint Denys (1867), the latter of whom influenced Freud’s The Interpretation of Goals, revealed in 1899. Additionally through the nineteenth Century, the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot experimented with hypnosis on so-called “hysterics” on the Salpêtrière Hospital. For all of those practitioners, publications of that are proven within the exhibition, desires have been deemed revelatory of the previous slightly than prophetic of the long run: a mirrored image of inside life buried beneath the floor.
The exhibition suffers most in its Eros part, the place the thought of the erotic—together with inside Greek mythology—avoids critiquing the violence imposed upon ladies. Some works are exhausting to parse: Ditlev Blunck’s The Nightmare from 1846 reveals a lady in mattress, her chest uncovered, her expression one among ecstasy, with a rabbit on her torso and the material of her cover mattress askew. Is that this a sly, amusing approach to champion a lady’s pleasure? Or is she creepily being ravaged and primed for a male gaze? Fairy tales like Sleeping Magnificence and Cinderella are additionally referenced however not reframed as outdated for his or her patriarchal nature.
The ultimate grouping of the present options the mattress itself—an all-purpose hometown, love, sickness and loss of life—and a locus of intimacy and give up. The graphite-and-watercolor work of an unmade mattress by Delacroix in 1824 was deployed for the exhibition’s catalogue cowl, doubling as a sublime research of material but in addition “evoking one thing troubling” per Bossi—a restlessness, so to talk. In contrast, Avigdor Arikha’s pastel of an empty mattress is proof “of a profitable marriage,” Bossi famous, with two pairs of slippers symbolically aligned on the base. Balthus’s La Phalène, articulated in casein tempera of a unadorned younger lady about to extinguish the flame of an oil lamp by her bedside, is the concluding work within the exhibition, though actually the primary work Bossi requested to mortgage for the present. It’s becoming that the start and the tip meet, an exhibition cycle and a sleep cycle in unison.
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