Musée Marmottan Monet’s “The Empire of Sleep” Considers Slumber as an Artistic Trope

The mythology of sleep has been intrinsic to human narratives as early as biblical times: Adam was asleep during Eve’s creation, Noah was disabled by catatonic drunkenness, Job suffered from insomnia during a crisis of faith, the apostles dozed in the Garden of Olives. These episodes are all referenced in the exhibition “L’Empire du Sommeil” (or “The Empire of Sleep”), on view at Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris through March 1, 2026. The show spotlights sleep as a respite throughout all stages of life, from the oblivion of newborns to the haunting specter of aging and death. Monet painted both ends—his baby son Jean clutching a doll (1868) and his ailing wife Camille enshrined in a white veil (1879) at the height of her bedridden suffering.

The exhibition text reminds viewers that sleep takes up about a third of our lives; given this significant consumption of hours, it deserves to be pondered and studied. (Wrestling with being unaware consumed both Hamlet—“To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream”—and Ottessa Moshfegh’s nameless narrator in her breakout 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation.) Laura Bossi, a neurologist and science historian, curated the show alongside the museum’s director of collections, Sylvie Carlier, and curatorial assistant Anne-Sophie Luyton. “The sleeping model is the ideal model,” Bossi remarked, adding that the artist can supply a “very tender look, trying to preserve a living souvenir”—although “there is always a sort of ambiguity” in the ethics of that vulnerability.

In keeping with the focus of the museum’s collections, the exhibition, which comprises 130 works, extends from the Enlightenment to the Great War with a smattering of historical and contemporary works thrown in. One example of the latter is the opening painting hung in the hallway as a prelude to the exhibition: Paula Rego’s illustration for Jean Rhys’ book Wide Sargasso Sea. It was modeled on her own family reposing on a brightly lit veranda in view of cool blue waters in Portugal, preceding the household’s ultimate uprooting to England. Towards the end of the exhibition, Kiki Smith’s 2001 work Sleep Walker, a woman drawn on Nepalese paper, includes a written component at the lower edge: “she thought if she just could keep her mind moving through her stillness she could awaken.”

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1603054" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/4.-Repos_de_midi_Ancher_1890-e1764617205283.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A woman in a white dress sleeps stretched out on a long wooden bench in a shady garden, her arm covering part of her face as flowers bloom in the foreground." width="970" height="757" data-caption='Michael Ancher, <em>La Sieste</em>, 1890. Huile sur toile, 62 x 79 cm. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Skagen, Art Museums of Skagen © Art Museums of Skagen</span>’>

The exhibition otherwise mostly sticks to works from the 19th Century. Its most serene depictions of sleep include Michael Ancher’s La Sieste, its subject a woman resting alfresco on a bench amidst garden greenery, hung toe-to-toe with Jean-Baptiste Chatigny’s young man in repose at the base of a tree. Perhaps no one is as placid as the two portraits of pets—an etching of a snuggled dog by David Hockney and a pencil drawing of a comatose cat by Gwen John.

Additionally endearing: John Everett Millais’s painting of a little girl who has nodded off in a pew during a sermon, her head tilting above her prim red cape and fur muff. Max Beckmann’s 1918 etching of himself and his friends yawning, their mouths collectively open and hands not quite covering the chasm of their oral cavities, is particularly amusing. Louis-Léopold Boilly’s lithograph Le Songe de Tartini depicts Giuseppe Tartini making a pact with a horned and winged devil—perched on the end of his bed while he’s tucked in, in a white nightgown—to help come up with his best composition (The Devil’s Trill Sonata).

These droll moments, however, are offset by works depicting a kind of feverish limbo. In La Somnambule, an 1865 oil painting by Courbet, a young woman’s direct gaze at the viewer belies her seemingly possessed and altered state. The oil painting Le Noctambule by Edvard Munch is a self-portrait in which the artist’s sunken eyes and concave posture evoke a zombie-like fitfulness, reflective of the artist’s troubles with sleeping and mental health alike. The stuporous women slumped over in a fin-de-siècle opium den in a painting by Gaetano Previati highlight the hazard inherent in escapist intoxicants.

More disturbing are paintings that show sleep as a kind of desperation. Fernand Pelez’s painting features a child selling violets in the street, too physically exhausted to uphold himself in his commerce and slumbering in a doorway: “it’s one of the few paintings in this exhibition that takes into account a social critique,” Bossi stated of this depiction of poverty and oppression. Edouard Vuillard’s La Berceuse, once in Picasso’s collection, is not of a woman cradling her baby, as the title might indicate in its allusion to a lullaby or soothing rocking motion. Rather, it is an older mother consoling her bedridden adult daughter—shown faceless with chagrin—who has lost her child in a miscarriage.

More extreme still are the unsettling depictions of death, framed as “eternal sleep,” be it Nadar’s eerie photograph of the deceased French writer Victor Hugo (eyes closed and white beard and chest bathed in light), 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 pain from cancer (which the painter chronicled obsessively in a series of 120 paintings).

A less mortal angle mined in the exhibition is the inscrutability of the dream—the sheer enigma of the unconscious. “Dreams are really the fabric—the construction—of our creativity,” Bossi noted. In the 19th Century, the scientific study of dreams debuted with the works of French scholar and physician Alfred Maury (1861) and Marquis d’Hervey de Saint Denys (1867), the latter of whom influenced Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899. Also during the 19th Century, the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot experimented with hypnosis on so-called “hysterics” at the Salpêtrière Hospital. For all of these practitioners, publications of which are shown in the exhibition, dreams were deemed revelatory of the past rather than prophetic of the future: a reflection of inner life buried beneath the surface.

The exhibition suffers most in its Eros section, where the idea of the erotic—including within Greek mythology—avoids critiquing the violence imposed upon women. Some works are hard to parse: Ditlev Blunck’s The Nightmare from 1846 shows a woman in bed, her chest exposed, her expression one of ecstasy, with a rabbit on her torso and the fabric of her canopy bed askew. Is this a sly, amusing way to champion a woman’s pleasure? Or is she creepily being ravaged and primed for a male gaze? Fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella are also referenced but not reframed as outdated for their patriarchal nature.

The final grouping of the show features the bed itself—an all-purpose place of birth, love, illness and death—and a locus of intimacy and surrender. The graphite-and-watercolor work of an unmade bed by Delacroix in 1824 was deployed for the exhibition’s catalogue cover, doubling as an elegant study of drapery but also “evoking something troubling” per Bossi—a restlessness, so to speak. By contrast, Avigdor Arikha’s pastel of an empty bed is evidence “of a successful marriage,” Bossi noted, with two pairs of slippers symbolically aligned at the base. Balthus’s La Phalène, articulated in casein tempera of a naked young woman about to extinguish the flame of an oil lamp by her bedside, is the concluding work in the exhibition, although in fact the first work Bossi requested to loan for the show. It is fitting that the beginning and the end meet, an exhibition cycle and a sleep cycle in unison.

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