The work depicts the legendary poet Ossian sleeping while he dreams of relatives, warriors and deities, which appear above him on the canvas.

[4][5] The literary source of the painting's scene can be found in a passage in The War of Inisthona from James Macpherson's Poems of Ossian.

Then, deprived of his father and of his son Oscar, [who was] slain treacherously, blind and sick, he [Ossian] charmed his unhappiness and his misery by chanting of the exploits of his friends.

[11] In 1800, Napoleon commanded architects Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine to decorate his summer residence Château de Malmaison.

[12][13][14] Napoleon was also the dedicatee of the 1803 opera Ossian, ou Les bardes by Jean-François Le Sueur, and he attended the 1804 premiere.

Sometime between 1810 and 1812, Ingres was commissioned by the French Governor of Rome Miollis to create two large paintings for the formerly papal Quirinal Palace.

[4] Some compositional choices may have also been influenced by the opera Ossian, ou Les bardes by Le Sueur,[4] whom Ingres knew.

[16] Additionally, it has been posited that Ingres's figures and outline technique in studies for the painting were drawn from British artist John Flaxman's 1792 illustration The Council of the Gods.

[5] In 2021, these included an 1811 work in pencil and chalk in the Scottish National Gallery[24] and a c. 1832–1834 watercolor drawing in the Harvard Art Museums.

The historical authenticity of Ossian was the subject of a contemporary debate,[27] and the composition still features classical aspects such as the near-Roman style of armor worn by the warriors.

There is also a potential parallel between Malvina (or Evirallina) in Ingres's depiction and the ghost of an old bard in Gérard's, since both figures are seen reaching out towards Ossian.

[2] In 1952, the art editor Thomas B. Hess saw The Dream of Ossian as "[having] all the emotional tone and sobbing fury that characterized the later appearance of Romantic painting.

"[28] In her 1968 article on an Ingres exhibition at the Petit Palais, the English art historian Anita Brookner did not view the painting favorably.

You don't know if it is simply a bad painting, harking back to the worst excesses of the Baroque, or a sort of precocious fumbling towards Cubism or even German Expressionist cinema.