Henri Julien Rousseau’s Life And His Artworks

Henri Rousseau was a self-taught painter who began intensive painting when he was 40 years old. In his time he was belittled, and even today some art critics regard his work as naive or folk. Rousseau’s disadvantage was his background. It is astonishing how this man from the working class with no artistic training was able to find a style of his own and how he never painted from the styles of the artist around him. He once said #“I have been told that my work is not of this century. As you will understand, I cannot now change my manner, which I have acquired as a result of obstinate toil.”

One might think that after no formal training he would be eager to learn techniques from his fellow artists, to experiment with the trendy styles like impressionism, post-impressionism, fauvism or cubism. But Rousseau wasn’t, and that is what makes him so unique. Rousseau was gifted with an exceptional sense of design and a feeling for color. He was a perfect example of the kind of artist in who the surrealist believe: #“the untaught eye could see much further than that of the trained artist.”

Henri Julien Rousseau was born in 1844 in Laval, a town in northwestern France. As a child Rousseau showed an interest in the arts, especially music and drawing. However because of the modest means of his family, art school was nothing but a dream. Due to financial troubles in 1852, the Rousseau family lost their home and moved away from Laval. They left Henri in Laval with relatives to attend school. While in school Rousseau won a competition for vocal music and one for drawing, but he did not do as well in his academic subjects and left secondary school without completing.

He then enlisted in the French army. During his service, Rousseau met soldiers who had survived the French expedition to Mexico(1862-65) Their descriptions of the subtropical country were undoubtedly the first inspiration for the exotic landscapes of his later work. The vividness of Rousseau’s portrayals led to the belief that he had traveled to Mexico, although in actuality, he never left France.

Rousseau was released from military service to care for his widowed mother when his father passed away in 1868. Rousseau married in 1869 and had nine children. But tragically around 1888 his wife, who had been ill for some time died. Within several years he lost all of his family except one daughter, whom he sent to live with relatives.

Rousseau worked as a customs inspector in Paris from 1871-93. His colleagues gave him his nickname “Le Douanier” (the customs officer), a position far grander than the one he actually held. His simple job was collecting taxes on goods brought into the city. During his time as a customs inspector Rousseau made his painting debut with the painting “Carnival Evening” in 1886 at the Salon des Artistes Independants (A show of independent artist). “Carnival Evening” was a masterpiece of its kind and an impressive beginning for the artist. This work exhibits an approach and representation that is typical of the artist, everything is literally and deliberately drawn; every branch of the trees is traced, the clouds have a strange solidity, and greater attention is paid to the costume than to the figures themselves. Sensitive observation of the colors of the evening and the literal treatment of trees and clouds ultimately contributes to an air of mystery.

Rousseau’s earliest works display some characteristics of primitive art such as flat surfaces, minute detail, stiff and frontally posed figures and arbitrary proportions. Throughout most of his career Rousseau’s subject were mostly the streets, bridges and public squares of his beloved Paris. In the last ten years of his life he produced his jungle pictures which proved to be the greatest of his achievements; this later work is simpler compositions with larger forms and bolder use of color, but the traits of primitive art can still be seen.

In 1890, Rousseau painted one of the most important works of his career his self portrait “Myself: Portrait-Landscape.” Standing in the foreground, palette in hand, Rousseau is surrounded by the Persian landscape, painted with great accuracy. In the painting Rousseau’s body appears to be floating above the ground, this is a great example of how he spent his life soaring over every obstacle. The clouds above his head seem to mimic the shape of his hat and the light blue sky is in sharp contrast to his dark suit. Rousseau is very large in the picture making the images in the back ground seem very far away. The sun is behind a cloud but the light does not seem to be coming from it, instead light seems to be coming from behind a set of buildings in the right corner giving the illusion of dusk.

Rousseau frequently strolled the streets of Paris searching for inspiration, and sketching from nature. He wrote: #“Nothing makes me happier than to contemplate nature and to paint it. Would you believe it that when I go out into the country and see all that sun, all that greenery and all those flowers, I sometimes say to myself: ‘All that belongs to me, it does.’” Rousseau’s interest in nature is displayed in his keen attention to the details of leaves, trees, and various species of animals in his paintings.

In his 1891 masterpiece “Tiger in a Tropical Storm Surprised!” A oriental tiger creeps through a jungle, its eyes bulging and whiskers upright with terror, presumably at the flash of lightning in the sky. The drama of the moment is enhanced by the strong wind and lashing rain which is applied on top of the painting with a translucent varnish-like material. Every leaf, branch, and grass blade is rendered with extraordinary precision, producing a hyper-realism of solid, integrated forms. Rousseau was remarkable and highly unusual in his method of painting. He applied each color separately, first applying the greens, then the blues, then the reds, and so forth, starting at the top of the canvas and working his way to the bottom.

In 1893 at the age of 49 Rousseau retired from his job of collecting taxes. With a small pension he set out to realize his dream of becoming a full-time artist. He taught violin, painting and singing on the side to supplement his pension. Four years into his retirement Rousseau painted one of his greatest works, The Sleeping Gypsy (1897). This painting depicts a female Gypsy asleep in a moonlit desert with a curious lion cautiously exploring the gypsy. The lion is probably just in her imagination but she is not worried about him being a danger: she thinks he is just a fantasy. This painting has a childlike look because of his use of nonrealistic flowing lines. He uses contrast to make his subjects stand out. The gypsy’s dark skin and the lions dark body make them standout against the light background. As with many of his paintings, there is a lot of empty space around the main subject. Except for the gypsy’s jug and mandolin the landscape is completely bare which frames the lion and the girl and draws the onlooker’s eye to the center. Rousseau uses long brushstrokes, which gives little texture to the painting, for example the sand looks smooth as silk.

In 1900, Rousseau attended The Paris World’s Fair. Being a man with great imagination He was inspired by what he saw there and it is possible that it had an impression on his later work. In 1904 Rousseau painted “Child with Doll”. As the name implies, this painting is of a young girl holding a small doll. The girl is dressed in a red dress and is in an awkward pose that makes it difficult to tell if she is sitting or standing. Rousseau changed the appearance of the child’s body, she is disproportioned and enlarged. Her face is full and flattened and she has no expression . There is a bare pale blue background which works to draw the viewers eye into the center of the painting. There is a sharp contrast between the girls red dress and the blue background and he uses simple shading techniques to separate the girl from the background.

Rousseau was introduced to Pablo Picasso in 1908. Picasso adored Rousseau’s work and threw a banquet in his honor. As the story goes all of the bohemian artistic world was there. Many toasts were drunk and the party became quite lively. Near the end Rousseau staggered up to Picasso and paid what was for Rousseau a splendid tribute: #“My dear Picasso,” he said, “we are the two greatest painters of our time–you in the Egyptian style and I in the modern style.” This is just one example of how convinced Rousseau was of his great talent, and how enthralled he was with the life he created for himself. Although critics ridiculed his efforts, he never lost confidence in his own ability and even saved his reviews in a scrapbook.

Rousseau’s work was respected by artist such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Odlin Redon, Paul Gaugin and the poet Guillaume Apollinare. They admired the imaginary settings, the lack of adherence to a precise and strict style and the dream like quality of Rousseau’s paintings. After his first visit to Rousseau’s studio, the artist Max Weber wrote that he felt he had been# “favored by the gods to meet one of the most inspiring and precious personalities in all Paris…” Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky both insisted on owning Rousseau’s works. Rousseau was not only a influence on artist in his own period, but he has also been a powerful influence on artists of our own time.

Toward the of his life, Rousseau painted Tropical Forest with Monkeys . His style had not changed dramatically since the beginning of his career. In this work, five different species of monkeys are surrounded by lush plants that create the impression of a jungle. The plants are painted in various shades of greens to create the qualities of a dense forest. The shapes and images are painted with little shadowing, giving an overall stage-like effect. There are large red-leafed plants on the left side of the work and large white lotus flowers rising behind them, emphasizing a sense of the exotic. Through a small clearing in the plants, one sees a brown macaque monkey. The monkeys appear childlike in their play, swinging from branch to branch.

The monkeys depicted in Tropical Forest with Monkeys actually inhabit different continents and could only come together in a book, a zoo, or an artist’s imagination. Found in Rousseau’s studio at the time of his death was an illustrated book of exotic animals– Wild Beasts: Approximately 200 Amusing Illustrations Drawn from the Life of Animals, with an Instructive Text. He never had the chance to actually see a rain forest or jungle, so he created his exotic images from books and what he saw at the botanical gardens in Paris. This is evident in many of Rousseau paintings for example in one of his paintings bananas are shown hanging upside down. And in “Tropical Forest with Monkeys” the lotuses blooms rise high above the water surface; in reality, they should float on top of the water. Upon close inspection, the viewer discovers the plants are disproportioned and are not a realistic interpretation of tropical vegetation.

Shortly before his death Rousseau painted his most ambitious jungle paintings and one of his greatest works, “Yadivigha’s Dream.” In this impressive fantasy, an enchanting nude rest on a red-plush Victorian sofa in the middle of a dense jungle. Huge flowers wave about her head, two lions and an elephant peer out of the undergrowth, and a dark skinned musician plays the flute behind her. Rousseau’s explanation of this scene is that the lady, having fallen asleep on the sofa, dreams that she is transported to this improbable region. The painting, which exhibits all of Rousseau’s descriptive and expressive skills is also supreme revelation of his powerful and uncommon imagination.

In 1910, Henri Rousseau died at the age of 64 of a self inflicted cut on his leg that became infected and then gangrenous. Rousseau’s death was a miserable one, he died virtually alone and was buried in a pauper’s grave. Below is the epitaph the poet Apollinaire wrote for the artist tomb.

Delaunay his wife Monseiur Queval and myself

Let our luggage pass duty free through the gates of heaven

We will bring you brushes paints and canvas

That you may spend your scared leisure in light of truth

Painting as you once did my portrait

In 1911 one year after the artist death, Wilhelm Hude organized a memorial exhibition for Rousseau in the salon des independents and published the first biography of the artist. Only after his death did Henri Rousseau’s paintings begin to sell.

Bibliography:

# Art2U: Henri Rousseau Biography www.art2u.com/gallery/biography/rousseau.com

# History of Henri Rousseau www.euro-art-gallery.net