Technique: oil on canvas Dimensions: 92x130 cm The work, which was unofficially presented at the 'Salvator Rosa' Fine Arts Promoting Society in Naples and at the Brera Academy Triennial Exhibition in Milan in 1894 due to its decidedly unusual theme and size, aroused widespread interest among critics and public alike. The most animated discussions and lively comments divided, from the start, those who fell in love with the work from those who criticised it harshly. Immersed in a bucolic tranquillity, the composition welcomes the image of the traditional shepherd musician, the sleeping woman and female nudes, symbolic evocation of dreams It is an "Arcadian subject - a shepherd who puts his woman to sleep to the sound of the bagpipes - dissolved in a kind of classical dream filled with female nudes. The author's different tendencies converge here: one linked to a form of regional realism bordering on folklore, the other derived from the influences of a symbolist culture. In detail, a young shepherd plays the bagpipes; lulled by the sweet sound, a beautiful peasant girl falls asleep next to him. While continuing to play, he daydreams of a crowd of beautiful women who approach him, surround him, speak to him: they are the sylphs of the forest and one of them, fascinated by the sound, falls asleep at the feet of the young peasant girl, representing Death. A bundle of broom divides her with weak stalks from the sleeping peasant girl to represent how only a slender diaphragm, a stalk, divides Sleep from Death, the ideal from the real, the symbol from lived life. Bibliography: Art and History, 1894, p. 57; La Rivista Abruzzese di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1895, p. 33