BOOK REVIEWS

SLEEP IN ART

Editor: Regine Pötzsch
Publisher: Editiones Roche (Switzerland)
1993

Reviewed by The Ambassadors Research Foundation

This 216-page book was published in 1993 by the international drug company Roche. The book includes 132 pieces done by world-renowned artists. The ten distinguished contributors represent a multidisciplinary team which includes medical doctors, psychologists, pharmacologists and experts in human physiology in addition to ethnologists, an art historian, and a fine arts specialist. This book is divided into nine chapters focusing on: daytime sleep, infant sleep, sleep physiology, the dream in art, sleep disorders, night attire, world's sleep, and sleep and dreams in myths. The book also includes artistic representations of sleep in animals!

In the forward of this precious book, the editor expresses the motivation behind this volume: 

"In the Tempest, Shakespeare's Prospero says, 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep.' The physiological fact that we spend two-thirds of our life awake and the other third asleep did not interest him in the least. Neither would he have been impressed by a concised definition such as the one coined by the well-known neurologist, Richard Jung, who has described sleep as an active biological regulatory process controlled by the brain. Like Shakespeare and Goethe, many poets and dramatists over the years have been fascinated by sleep, 'god of the night', and have dealt with the phenomena of sleep and dreams in a wide variety of ways. Countless famous artists representing almost every epoch and style, have also explored what is still, despite modern experimental sleep research, the mysterious 'dark third' of our lives. Using pen, color and brush, chisel and hammer, their aim has been to capture the many and varied faces of sleep."

 

Sleeping Woman, about 3500 B.C.
Terracota, National Museum, Valetta, Malta

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)
Sleeping Children
The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo

 
Albert Anker (1831-1910)
Auf dem Ofen (On the stove), 1895
Kunsthaus, Zurich

Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896)
My Second Sermon
Guildhall Art Gallery, London

Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506)
Madonna and Child, ca. 1454
Nationalgalerie, Berlin

François Boucher (1703-1770)
Interrupted Sleep, 1750
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jules Bache Collection, New York

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877)
Woman Sleeping at the Spinning Wheel, 1853
Musée Favre, Montpellier

Master Heinrich of Constance
John, Lying Close to the Breast of Jesus, ca. 1320.
Mayer van den Bergh Museum, Antwerp

The Seven Sleeping Youths of Ephesus
Greek, 18th century
S.Amberg Collection, Kölliken, Switzerland

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Siesta, 1919
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Sleeping Demon Kumbhakarna
The British Library, Oriental & India Office Collections, London

The Vision of Buddha's Father, 1793
Völkerkundemuseum, Heidelberg

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