Young Woman Sleeping

Young Woman Sleeping, painted in 1710 and held in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, belongs to a long European tradition of the sleeping figure as both formal and psychological subject: sleep renders the subject defenceless, absorbed, unaware of being watched, creating an intimacy available only in this unguarded state. Santerre's sleeping women — he painted several — carry the tradition from the Dutch sleeping servant scenes of the previous century toward the more overtly sensual sleeping Venus type that would become a Rococo staple. The Catalan collection, which preserves significant European Baroque and Rococo holdings, acquired this work through the channels of international art collecting that brought French painting to Spanish institutions from the eighteenth century onward.

Sleep is technically demanding: the completely relaxed face must read as inhabited rather than blank, and the absence of the engaged gaze that animates Santerre's other female subjects must be compensated by particularly careful modelling of the skin's warmth and the languorous fall of the figure. He uses diffuse light and warm tones to avoid the coldness that threatens unconscious subjects.