Night and Sleep

In the painting dark-haired Night guides her son Sleep. His relaxed pose is set against the "more energetic line of his mother's body." Art historian Elise Lawton Smith notes that the couple's "horizontality suggests both sleep and lateral movement as they pass across the landscape". Poppies, symbolic of sleep, peace, death and the artist's pacifism, are listlessly strewn by the somnolent Sleep as he passes.