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." In her 1968 article on an Ingres exhibition at the Petit Palais, the English art historian Anita Brookner did not view the painting favorably. She described the depiction of the dream as "grisaille" and the painting as an Ingres work that must be "written off". In 2018, anthropologist Peter Gow wrote that the work was an "extremely strange painting." He later explained, "The young Ingres who painted "The Dream of Ossian" is either bizarrely reactionary or bizarrely prophetic. 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."