ROUSSEAU, Henri

Featured Paintings in Detail

(1)

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Repast of the Lionc. 1907Oil on canvas, 114 x 160 cmMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Repast of the Lion (detail)c. 1907Oil on canvas, 114 x 160 cmMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Repast of the Lion (detail)c. 1907Oil on canvas, 114 x 160 cmMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Repast of the Lion (detail)c. 1907Oil on canvas, 114 x 160 cmMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Repast of the Lion (detail)c. 1907Oil on canvas, 114 x 160 cmMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Hungry Lion Attacking an Antelope 1905Oil on canvas, 200 x 301 cm Ernst Beyeler Collection, Basel

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Hungry Lion Attacking an Antelope (ddetail)1905Oil on canvas, 200 x 301 cm Ernst Beyeler Collection, Basel

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Hungry Lion Attacking an Antelope (ddetail)1905Oil on canvas, 200 x 301 cm Ernst Beyeler Collection, Basel

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Hungry Lion Attacking an Antelope (ddetail)1905Oil on canvas, 200 x 301 cm Ernst Beyeler Collection, Basel

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Hungry Lion Attacking an Antelope (ddetail)1905Oil on canvas, 200 x 301 cm Ernst Beyeler Collection, Basel

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Sleeping Gypsy1897 Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 200.7 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Sleeping Gypsy (detail)1897 Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 200.7 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Sleeping Gypsy (detail)1897 Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 200.7 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Sleeping Gypsy (detail)1897 Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 200.7 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Jardin du Luxembourg1909Oil on canvas, 38 x 47 cmThe Hermitage, St. Petersburg

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Jardin du Luxembourg (detail)1909Oil on canvas, 38 x 47 cmThe Hermitage, St. Petersburg

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Jardin du Luxembourg (detail)1909Oil on canvas, 38 x 47 cmThe Hermitage, St. Petersburg

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Jardin du Luxembourg (detail)1909Oil on canvas, 38 x 47 cmThe Hermitage, St. Petersburg

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Jardin du Luxembourg (detail)1909Oil on canvas, 38 x 47 cmThe Hermitage, St. Petersburg

ROUSSEAU, Henri, Featured Paintings in Detail, (1)

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ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Repast of the Lion

Rousseau was a self-taught artist whose first exhibition was held in Paris in 1886, when he was 42. He began to paint imaginary scenes set in the jungle by 1891, the present painting showing a lion devouring a jaguar was probably exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1907. The artist's unique vision, his intuitive sense of design and colour, and his

precise, profuse use of detail combine to render this mysterious, exotic world authentic. The vegetation is inspired by his visits to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, but he disregarded their actual sizes in inventing forests that dwarf the figures of natives and animals. His animals are based on photographs in a children's book owned by his daughter.

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Sleeping Gypsy

Rousseau described the subject of The Sleeping Gypsy: “A wandering Negress, a mandolin player, lies with her jar beside her (a vase with drinking water), overcome by fatigue in a deep sleep. A lion chances to pass by, picks up her scent yet does not devour her. There is a moonlight effect, very poetic.” A toll collector for the city of Paris, Rousseau was a largely

self-taught painter, although he had ambitions of entering the Academy. This goal was never realized, but his sharp colors, fantastic imagery, and precise outlines—derived from the style and subject matter of popular print culture— struck a chord with a younger generation of avant-garde painters, including Pablo Picasso, Vasily Kandinsky, and Frida Kahlo.

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Hungry Lion Attacking an Antelope

It was with this famous jungle painting that Rousseau made his breakthrough at the Paris Salon d’Automne of 1905. The target of mockery and ridicule in the nineteenth century, at the start of the twentieth he became a revered artist of the avant-garde. Apollinaire, Delaunay, Léger, Braque and Picasso all visited him in his studio, and Wassily Kandinsky praised

him in the Blauer Reiter almanac as the “father of grand realism”. A typical feature of Rousseau’s paintings is the tension between botanical objectivity and the aura of enigmatic fantasy. Rousseau had only second-hand knowledge of the world’s exotic regions. He modelled his animals and plants instead from magazines, photos and the dioramas in the

Jardin des Plantes in Paris. His wilderness is presented as a beautifully arranged herbarium: leaf upon leaf, one blade of grass beside the next. Rousseau’s jungle is a well-composed symphony in green, a meticulously painted collage of flora and fauna. At the very centre, with other animals looking on, we are witness to a life-and-death struggle.

ROUSSEAU, HenriThe Jardin du Luxembourg

A bombastic inscription on the back of the painting proclaims "A View of the Jardin du Luxembourg. The Monument to Chopin.Composition." Following the example of recognized masters, Rousseau found an interesting motif and then worked it up, perfecting the composition in the studio. The thoroughly executed, immobile, and trivial details

of his landscapes come together in meaningful "dumb scenes" that prompted a contemporary to dub him "the dreamer of reality.

ROUSSEAU, Henri

(Le Douanier)

French painter Henri Julien Félix Rousseau, called Le Douanier [the customs officer] the epithet his friends later used although he was a tax collector for more than 20 years before he retired to paint (1893). He was an ambitious, self-taught naive painter. Rousseau admired past academic artists like Bouguereau, and took direct inspiration from the Jardin des Plantes, but he was adopted by the leaders of modern art, with Apollinaire often acting as publicist. Rousseau measured

Apollinaire for his portrait alongside Marie Laurencin in La Muse inspirant le poete: the resemblance is gauche yet unmistakable.

Although he claimed to have lived in Mexico in his youth, he later admitted that the claim was false. The only tropical vegetation Rousseau ever saw was in Parisian greenhouses, and his remarkable landscapes had no counterpart in

nature. His painted jungles are an organized profusion of carefully defined yet fantastic plants, half-concealing various wild animals with startlingly staring eyes. These scenes are rendered in a vivid, almost hypnotic folk style. The finest ones include The Snake Charmer (1907; Musée du Louvre, Paris) and The Dream (1910; Museum of Modern Art, New

York). With the same approach Rousseau employed in painting the familiar (e.g., Village Street Scene, 1909; Philadelphia Museum of Art), he painted the haunting and dreamlike Sleeping Gypsy (1897; Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Rousseau exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants from 1886, but did not become well known until the early years of the 20th century when he was "taken up" by Picasso, Apollinaire, and other members of the Parisian avant garde. In his

honour Picasso organised a banquet in the Bateau-Lavoir in 1908, attended by artists and writers.