Fabricating Intimacy – Images of Sleeping Women in Nineteenth-Century Painting

ABSTRACT In the nineteenth century, paintings of sleeping females proliferated, yet unlike painters of mythological sleep scenes of previous centuries, painters such as Courbet, Bonnard and Vuillard set an intimate scene, leaving the (usually female) sleeper alone with the viewer in interiors, wrapping her up in layers of sheets or heavy dresses. This article reveals how several painters (from about 1850–1910) used the sleeping figure to examine a visual impossibility: the representation of interiority.