Sleep (c. 1771): Art, History and Details

Sleep (c. 1771) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean Bernard Restout (French, 1732–1797).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The tradition of painting nude male figures in a studio setting was the cornerstone of artistic practice, teaching artists to depict the human body in complex poses in order to create larger narratives. However, by the late 1700s, some artists began to see these studies as independent works of art. By adding the wings and the poppies, Restout transformed his study into a more specific subject, and he first exhibited the work in a privately organized exhibition in 1783 under the title of Morpheus, the god of sleep.

Object facts

• Title: Sleep
• Date: c. 1771
• Creator attribution: Jean Bernard Restout (French, 1732–1797)
• Culture: France
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 127.5 x 160 x 14 cm (50 3/16 x 63 x 5 1/2 in.); Unframed: 97.6 x 130 cm (38 7/16 x 51 3/16 in.)
• Collection: P - French 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1963.502

A detail from the museum

A source of inspiration for this painting was probably the Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses, which describes the god of sleep as living in a cave with sleep-inducing poppies at the entrance.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Year in Review." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, L, (December, 1963): 278-279.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.
• Francis, Henry S. “Jean Honoré Fragonard: Morpheus.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 53, no. 3 (1966)

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.