Safaris in the Rue Cuvier
Until the Israelis got into another fistfight and spoiled the summer, Washington was basking in the promise of a much simpler slap-down with Iran and a visit by Henri Rousseau the scam artist.
The old customs officer’s sojourn at a DC museum had caused a considerable buzz that even my own newspaper in Bangkok picked up on (although we also delved into Paris Hilton’s first record album at the same time, so the point is moot).
What I found most interesting about the
A trip to the Natural Museum of History in rue Cuvier in Paris, home of Le Douanier’s taxidermy inspirations, offered little (although the new website is coming along nicely), but the good old Tate delivers big time, as usual.
In fact, the Tate’s Rousseau webpages go far beyond “Jungles in Paris”. You really get to know the guy. But first, about those animals …
“Although stories abounded about Rousseau’s supposed military adventures in the jungles of Mexico,” the Tate site says, “he never actually left France. Instead, the exotic scenes he depicted were largely based on the foliage and animals he saw on his regular pilgrimages to the Paris Natural History Museum, and to the botanical gardens and zoo that surrounded it.
“Rousseau was also an eager scavenger of images from a variety of printed sources … Perhaps his most important source was an album entitled ‘Bêtes Sauvages’ (’Wild Beasts’), [and] Le Petit Journal was a popular magazine. He drew heavily on its illustrations of animals and exotic scenes.”
Well, it would have been dangerous actually going to Africa, wouldn’t it, and besides, his day job really was at the customs office, so how much dough did he have to spend on safaris? He was always hard up for cash, and at least tried amending the situation in dodgy ways.
Rousseau went hunting instead among the dusty dioramas at the museum and the glass houses of the Jardin des Plantes – and dreamed. His not-always-deliberately stylised visions transplanted species into non-native environments, and he famously depicted bunches of bananas growing upside down.
To be fair, he never called himself a freaking scientist. Below, “Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo” from 1908. Pattern seen forming; bananas in fact grow up from the stem.
Henri-Julien-Félix Rousseau was born in Laval, northwest France, on May 1, 1844, to petit-bourgeois parents. The original Sir Richard Burton was already poking around the jungles in equatorial Africa, and soon France would be laying claim to far-off Vietnam and Cambodia, something about cooking spices, I think.
When he was 20, Henri stole money from his boss, a solicitor, and predictably enough did some time in the slammer. Four years later he began doing time in matrimonial prison with his landlord’s daughter, Clémence Boitard, and soon after that got a job in the toll service slapping duty on goods entering Paris.
In 1874, with Stanley exploring the Congo, the first impressionist exhibition was held in Paris. British troops were sending home stories of the Indian empire and slaughtering Boers in south Africa, and the French colonised Tunisia. The larger world was getting pretty interesting, so Rousseau started painting pictures of it.
At the age of 40, having done his best to copy the masters at the Louvre, he submitted a work to the Salon, was shown the door, and wandered into the Groupe des Indépendants instead.
He next got his head turned round by Eugène Delacroix’s animal paintings, devoured the accounts flooding in from various exotic explorations and painted this self-portrait, aptly titled “Myself”, with the brand new Eiffel Tower in the background. (Even on a large image you can barely seen it – it’s obstructed by the ship flying flags of the world, testament to his travelling ambitions.)
Paul Gauguin thought the picture was great, and there was no stopping our Henri.
“Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)” – this is a detail – drew both astonishment and sarcasm when it went on show in 1891 and ‘92, but France was by then swallowing up large chunks of Africa, so Rouseau’s timing was pretty good.
In 1899, having buried his first wife and a son, he married Joséphine Noury, and gave up on jungle scenes, but four years later Joséphine died too and he returned to the jungle of his imagination. (Coincidence? Just wondering.)
Henri was finding wider acceptance around town but still struggling when, in 1907, he was “persuaded by a musician friend to collaborate in a bank fraud”. He got nabbed and was chucked in prison again, but this time, firing off letters proclaiming first his innocence and then his naivety (using his paintings as evidence!), he was acquitted. The old snake charmer.
Picasso and Apollinaire hosted a banquet at the former’s studio in his honour. It became “legendary”, although I haven’t been able to find out why it became legendary. Someone must have done something very silly.
Much has been made about the big guns of modern art toying with Rousseau, humouring him like a kid who wants to play with the grown-ups, but Picasso, Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay, to name three anyway, genuinely admired him. The photo here shows Pablo in 1932, in his studio in the rue La Boétie, with Rousseau’s “Portrait of a Woman”. Picasso had bought it in 1907 for five francs and hung on to it for the rest of his life. As the Modern Lovers song says, Pablo Picasso was not an asshole.
And yet, even though Rousseau’s soirées in his Montmartre studio drew important patrons, writers and artists, when he died in September 1910, he was flat busted, and ended up in a pauper’s grave with few pals to see him off.
The following year, though, the Salon des Indépendants paid homage with an exhibition of 40 works, and in 1913, Delaunay and Picasso bought a nice headstone for Rousseau’s grave on which Constantin Brancusi and Ortiz de Zarate engraved a memorial inscription by Apollinaire. It reads in part, “We’ll bring you brushes, paints and canvases so that you can devote your sacred leisures in the Real light to painting, as you did my portrait, painting the Face of the stars.”
