A naked woman reclines on a red velvet sofa. The sofa is in a jungle. Around her are giant leaves, lotus flowers, lions, an elephant, birds and a dark figure playing a flute.

Rousseau's explanation was simple: the woman, asleep on her sofa, is dreaming she has been transported into the jungle. He even wrote a short poem to accompany the painting.

Rousseau never travelled to the tropics. His jungles were assembled from visits to the botanical gardens and zoo in Paris, from picture books and from his imagination — which is why his plants are so perfect and so strange. The Dream was exhibited in March 1910. He died that September, making it one of the last great works of a man who painted the jungle without ever seeing one.