#sleep

The long, low shape is the giveaway, apparently: pictures built this wide were often part of the furniture — a bench back, or the panel set above a bed — rather than something hung by itself. There are wasps up in one corner that some people read as a pun on a family's name.

The story behind it is a man asleep on a rock dreaming of a ladder with angels going up and down it. Most painters put the whole ladder in, from what I've read — there's barely a hint of it here, which I think is the better call.

He'd walked out of the official Viennese art establishment years before this with a group who set up their own building to show in, which is roughly the world this belongs to. The reading you come across most often is that all the figures here are one girl dreaming herself into different lives — though as far as I can tell that's other people's guesswork, not anything he ever said.

This was the one that made him, from what I've read — it caused a real stir when it first went on show, mostly because of how sexual people found it, and he painted the idea more than once afterwards. Much later people started treating it as an early go at the unconscious, decades before anyone had the vocabulary for that.

It's the story where the lover only ever comes at night and she's forbidden to know who he is. Most painters gave her a beautiful boy; here, according to the museum, he's deliberately an awkward teenager very pleased with himself, taken partly from an old Greek poem that calls him a mean-spirited brat. Painted in exile in Brussels, after the empire he'd spent years working for collapsed.