Now housed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this groundbreaking French painting is a masterpiece of the Naïve Art scene of the late 1800s. An imaginary scene, it depicts an exhausted black woman sleeping on the ground with her mandolin and a jar of water next to her on a moonlit night as a lion stands right by her face, picking up her scent. Oddly, the lion’s body language has widely been interpreted & recognized as non-threatening, almost providing compassionate company to this tired lady in her moment of peace. That, along with this painting's peculiar colour palette, spatial perspective & lighting has lent this work a strangely fantastical quality that places it rather uniquely in the pantheon of Western Fine Art.