"The Dreamers" by Albert Joseph Moore (1841-1893).

The Dreamers, by Albert Joseph Moore (1841-1893). 1882. Oil on canvas. Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery. 27 1/2 x 47 5/8 inches (70 x 121 cm.) Presented by Richard Tangye and George Tangye, 1884. Accession Number: 1885P2467. Image courtesy of Birmingham Museums Trust under the terms of the Creative Commons Zero licence (CCO).

Dreamers was shown at the Royal Academy in 1882, no. 407. By the time it was exhibited, Moore's mature style had already evolved, and it continued largely unchanged until his death. Major paintings from this period consist of two main types, either single standing female figures painted on narrow upright canvases like Birds, Sapphires, or A Reader, or frieze-like groups of three or four female figures. Dreamers was the first of this latter class of subject to be exhibited, followed by later masterpieces like Reading Aloud in 1884 and A Summer Night in 1890. Hedberg felt that "the theme of sleeping or dreaming would naturally have appealed to Moore as he consciously tried to eliminate all expressive human emotions from his paintings" (151).

In Dreamers the two women to the left are asleep, while the one to the right is awake but drowsy, as she gazes straight ahead with half-closed eyes, her head tilted slightly upwards. A.L. Baldry has described the composition of Dreamers in this way:

In the Dreamers the three girls sit side by side on a long low sofa covered with pink, green, and brown Persian embroidery, on a ground of brownish cream colour. Their draperies are of pale primrose yellow brocade, and about the head and neck of each figure is a loose scarf of warm orange brown. White gauze is thrown along the seat of the couch and over the knees of the middle girl, and is looped up behind the couch so as to make a background to the three heads. The wall is divided into panels alternately of pale sage green and white brocade, and of golden lattice work; and the floor, where not hidden by a red and green Persian rug, is tessellated with squares of green and white marble. A yellow fan lies at the end of the sofa. The picture is both in conception and execution one of the ablest of Albert Moore's achievements, and ranks high among the successive important canvases that he produced during the last twelve years of his life. [53]

Extensive preparations over a number of years went into perfecting every detail of Moore's composition. Many studies for, or later adaptations from, the three female figures from Dreamers were worked up into independent works of art in various colour harmonies, including A Workbasket, Jasmine, Rose Leaves,A Siesta, Musk, Yellow Marguerites and Acacias. As Robyn Asleson has explained, these studies allowed Moore to "perfect every detail of Dreamers, focusing particularly on the complex interplay of the drapery systems (158). In this painting Asleson felt Moore revived a motif of girls on a bench that he first explored over a decade earlier in The Shulamite; Asleson also emphasized how this work highlights the correspondences between painting and music:

The rigorous design strategy that he had evolved over the previous ten years enabled Moore to reinterpret this group as a far more tightly orchestrated chromatic and linear arrangement. The colour scheme of Dreamers, though closely allied with that of The Shulamite, more palpably evokes that iridescence of mother-of-pearl. The shimmering silver and gold highlights of the white and cream drapery, flecked with pink and green accents, bear out Baldry's claim that "from flowers, feathers and shells came the first hints for the delicate graduations which dominated his colour schemes."

Asleson goes on to further emphasize the way in which Moore's work brought out the correspondences between the arts of painting and music, and the concept of synaesthesia.

Musical analogies implicit in The Shulamite are more powerfully invoked in Dreamers through Moore's artful use of repetition and variation. Each set of reiterated elements within the composition – the alternating panels of wallpaper and grille, the knotted bunting, and the virtually identical women – marks out its own syncopated rhythm, layered one over the other. As in Moore's other paintings, the human figures are treated as elements of the décor, the resemblance to one another as intentional as the repetitions of the wallpaper pattern. The rhythmically repeated elements also carry the suggestions of melody, played out variously by the tight filigree and geometric configurations on the wall, the stately rise and fall of the bunting, and the flowing drapery across the women's bodies. The deep swags in the lower register of the painting employ the principle of repetition once again, providing diffuse reflections of the bunting above, like clouds reflected in a pool of water. [155]

Contemporary Reviews of the Painting

F.G. Stephens in The Athenaeum felt this was a return to the successes of his earlier work:

Mr. A. Moore's contributions display his fine and original views of art, and will reassure those who have observed too many signs of decline in his recent works. His best work recalls his earlier achievements, and it much resembles them. It is called Dreamers (407), and is, technically speaking, a study in primrose, carnations, and white; a row of damsels, in a lotus-eating mood, recline with more or less of ease on a long bench. [544

A reviewer for The Illustrated London News found Moore's work too repetitious:

Dreamers (407), by A. Moore, shows this time three instead of one repetition of his stock Greek maiden lolling on a couch, one of them in the same foreshortened attitude that we have seen, perhaps a dozen times. On this occasion they are all three robed in the same lemon-coloured draperies, to the detriment of the picture as a colour "symphony" (which is not monotonous) or as decoration. We have always recognized in this artist's work a true feeling for classic style and a refined sense of colour; but what vacuity of thought does this self-iteration, which has arrested all progress ina once promising career, not imply? [438]

The Artist in its Collated Press Opinion on the Royal Academy Exhibition (p. 198) quoted from a number of sources:

The Times - "Dreamers is a row of maidens in the thinnest classical draperies, dreaming side by side on an ottoman. Its qualities of line require careful study, for the whole picture is scarcely more than an attempt to gain beauty by arrangement of different lines of drapery, slightly contrasted here and there with curves of the human figure. That it shows more science than any of Mr. Moore's previous works we are inclined to believe, but it also appears to us to lack that freshness of impression and that light grace of movement which used to be the painter's chief charm. There is a languid heaviness about all the women in the picture which is almost suggestive of over-feeding."

The Standard – "Line and colour, and no story at all."

The Observer – "The dreaming damsels are in such attitudes that their sensations on awakening are likely to be terrible."

The Magazine of Art – "Mr. Albert Moore's enchanting Dreamers.

Related Material

Bibliography

Asleson, Robyn. Albert Moore. London: Phaidon, 2000,155-58.

Baldry, Alfred Lys. Albert Moore. His Life and Works. London: George Bell and Sons, 1893, 48-53.

Blackburn, Henry. Academy Notes VIII London: Chatto and Windus, (May 1882): 39.

"Collated Press Opinion on The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Artist III (June 1, 1882): 198.

Dreamers. Art UK. Web. 3 October 2026.

"The Exhibition of the Royal Academy." The Art Journal XLIV (1882): 210-12.

"The Exhibitions." The Magazine of Art V (1882): 352.

Hedberg, Gregory. "Albert Moore." The Victorian High Renaissance. London: Lund Humphries, 1978, cat. 80, 150-51.

Lambourne, Lionel. The Aesthetic Movement. London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1996. 197.

"Pictures at the Royal Academy – II." The Architect XXVII (13 May 1882): 291-92.

"Pictures at the Royal Academy." The Builder XLII (May 6, 1882): 538-39.

Prettejohn, Elizabeth. Art for Art's Sake. Aestheticism in Victorian Painting. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. 101-03, 106-07.

"The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Illustrated London News LXXX (6 May 1882): 438.

Spaulding, Frances. Magnificent Dreams. Burne-Jones and the Late Victorians. New York, E.P. Dutton, 57-58.

Stephens, Frederic George. "Fine Arts. The Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 2844 (29 April 1882): 544-45.

Created 3 October 2026