Sweet Dreams

Sweet Dreams, painted in 1904, depicts a young woman asleep or in a reverie so deep as to approach sleep—the subject of pleasant unconscious vision that had been a recurrent theme in Victorian painting from Lord Leighton's Flaming June onward. Godward's version of the sleeping or dreaming beauty subject is more intimate in scale than Leighton's monumental works, the figure shown in closer proximity and with a less heroic compositional structure. The title's connotation of pleasant unconscious experience connects the figure's physical rest to a life of imaginative abundance.

The sleeping figure is arranged in the horizontal pose of complete physical relaxation, Godward's compositional challenge being to create visual interest within the limited expressive range of unconsciousness. The drapery's behavior as it settles around the reclining form provides the painting's primary formal variety, each fold described with his customary meticulous attention to textile behavior.