Painting the Dream: From the Biblical Dream to Surrealism

Sometimes these ideas have existed simultaneously: thus we have, only a few years apart, Raphael’s limpid High Renaissance composition of Jacob dreaming his Ladder; Albrecht Dürer’s watercolor of a mysterious deluge that he saw in his own slumbers; and Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmarish hellscapes.

More recently, movements such as Symbolism and Surrealism have taken the dream as a primary source of inspiration, even conflating dreaming and the creative process itself. This rich vein of visionary art runs from Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, through De Chirico and Dalí, down to the present―demonstrating, as Bergez reminds us, that Morpheus was a god of form as well as of dreams.

Daniel Bergez is a scholar, curator, and critic whose work focuses on the relationship between painting and literature. His books in French include Literature and Painting; To Paint, To Write: The Dialogue of the Arts; The Salon and Its Artists; and Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul, which won the Prix Bernier of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Bergez is also a painter whose work is regularly exhibited in France, the U.S., China, and Japan.