People play rugby everyday?  Absolutely.  But is this an everyday image?  Yes.  And no. 
Yes, Rousseau relies on the ordinary
to express the extraordinary, but 
his lack of academic training, or Naiveté, disregards any inhibitions.  The result:
grown men dress in pajama stripes
and handlebar mustaches.  This masking effect coupled with the reliance on a small handful
of colors is similar to a child drawing
look-alike characters with only two or three crayons (except that the child has an
above average sense of color combination). 
Though Rousseau received no formal education, he gives each tree, each leaf, detailed attention.  Rousseau spent many hours in botanical gardens and zoos, as well as in the study of the
fantastic images in his daughter's schoolbooks. 

When asked where he learned so much
about the jungle, Rousseau commented
on his army years spent in Mexico; however,
art historians agree that this was a fabrication
(Pioch).  Garden plants and tropical vegetation combine in monstrous or eerily miniscule forms,
sometimes overwhelming the unlikely characters around them.  To the right, dressed as
a woman of the times, the figure stands amid
a stage-like jungle surrounded by overgrown houseplants and dwarfed by trees
which grow oranges bigger than her head. 
Combining the extravagant and the miniscule
is a major point of Magical Realist art.

Preserving the same dense flatness of his jungle paintings, this woman falls into a rigid sleep in a stage-like desert setting.  The simple arrangement and limited color palette gives harmony to an eerily calm image.  Without training, this painting taps into what many artists admire in Rousseau's naive style: an appreciation, if not a direct relation to, the folkloric styles.

"Unlike the true folk artists," writes Hamilton, "the modern naive artist is usually a city dweller..."  Rousseau's work may constitute a certain naiveté, but rapid modernization towers the black-cloaked automatons of
this painting.  The houses as well as
the people seem to be backdrops
propped on stilts.  The cracked earth,
the dense foliage (which begs for attention to its minute detail)
and the omniscient electric poles -- everyday realities
Rousseau chose not to ignore.