Dali House

Just finished a Google Earth tour of Henri Rousseau’s life and times, a hefty elaboration on Dali House’s earlier foray. See the GE post here.

This is the whole story, and then some, in three parts, on an artist who, though known and loved the world over, somehow doesn’t rate an appearance in my “Essential History of Art” from Parragon, and he’s not in my “Great Artists” from DK’s Annotated Guides either, although many lesser-known names are. There are reasons for this, not all of them good ones …

“Rousseau walks on trumpet paths,” Joni Mitchell sings against a gauntlet of Burundi drums in “The Jungle Line”.

Henri Rousseau, “the very-good-very-bad painter”, remains enigmatic nearly a century after his death. He is the not-quite-post-impressionist who always requires an explanatory sidebar of his own. All his life he felt he didn’t fit in, probably because he didn’t, until Picasso threw a rowdy party for him that enthroned him as “the master”. His fellow artists were being facetious, but they genuinely loved the way he rubbed the high-brow art world’s noses in his garish palette.

The funniest thing was, “the Douanier” really did believe his paintings were realistic. “The hungry lion throws itself on the antelope, devours him,” he trilled about one of his jungle scenes, enrapt by its frightening authenticity. “Birds of prey have each torn a strip of flesh from the poor animal that is shedding a tear! The sun sets.”

And to Picasso, at the end of the soon-to-be-legendary Banquette Rousseau, he pronounced tearily, “You and I are the greatest painters of our time, you in the Egyptian style, I in the modern.” Onlookers sniggered at the audacity, but Le Douanier knew what they did not yet know, that his spirited jungle had been colonised by a race of people who walked sideways and spoke in hieroglyphics.

It’s been said, oversimplistically but sympathetically, that “he didn’t know the rules well enough to break them”. But of course there are no rules in the kingdom of the imagination.

Henri-Julien-Felix Rousseau was born on May 21, 1844, in the Loire Valley market town of Laval. In 1947 a plaque commemorating his birthplace was installed on the centuries-old Beucheresse Gate in Place Hardy de Levare.

His father was a tinsmith, peddling wares from a small shop, but struggled financially and was forced to sell up in 1852. The family moved to Couptrain while Henri remained in Laval with relatives, attending school until age 16 but quitting ahead of graduation to rejoin his family, now in Angers.

In 1863, with compulsory military service imminent, Rousseau clerked for a solicitor in Angers, but he embezzled a small sum of money and some stamps from his employer and, after spending a month in prison, enrolled in the army of the Second Republic.

“The Artillerymen”, from 1895.

France was at the time tightening its grip on Vietnam and colonising Cambodia and parts of Africa, but Rousseau never left his homeland. He served for four years in the 51st Infantry Regiment, posted to the town of Dreux. Here he met soldiers returning from the French expedition to Mexico in support of Emperor Maximilian and listened in awe to their stories of the subtropics, doubtless his first inspiration for the exotic landscapes that later became the theme of his best-known paintings. Here, a detail from his painting.

In 1868 Rousseau’s father died and he was released from military service to support his mother. He moved to Paris for work, where he met and married a cabinetmaker’s daughter, 18-year-old dressmaker Clemence Boitard. They had a son two years later, but the child survived only a few months. In fact, of the five children they had (some sources say seven, some nine), only Julia, born in 1876, lived into adulthood. She died in 1956.

One of Rousseau’s early addresses in Paris was at 135 Rue de Sevres, shown approximately here. His wife’s long suffering from tuberculosis ended in 1888, when she was just 37, and within several years he lost all of his family except for Julia, who he sent to live with relatives.

Rousseau wholeheartedly believed in the spirit world, and once insisted to visitors to his studio that his late wife, pictured below, was guiding his hand while he painted. “Didn’t you see her or hear her? ‘Keep at it, Henri,’ she whispered. ‘It’s going to come out right in the end’.”

In 1871 Rousseau secured a second-class clerk’s job in the Paris toll service, known as the Octroi, imposing duty on goods entering the city. This was the position that later earned him the nickname “Le Douanier”, meaning “the customs officer”, although the toll office had no actual customs function. He worked at toll stations at the Vanves Gate and on the Auteuil embankment. Shown here is a detail from his 1890 painting “The Customs Post”. Click it to see the whole picture.

He and Clemence had a son, Antoine, in 1872 and, four years later, a daughter, Julia. Sometime around 1880, watching the world move by him, he began filling notebooks with drawings. “My superiors at the tollgate used to assign me to less demanding duties so that I would find it easier to work,” he once admitted.

In his 40s, Rousseau took up painting in earnest with the stated ambition of matching the talent of the formalist and formulaic French Academie des Beaux-Arts painters. He always claimed to have had “no teacher other than nature”, but admitted to have received “some advice” from the established academicians Felix Auguste-Clement, who was his neighbour, and through him Jean-Leon Gerome. He was also known to have sought out William Bouguereau, another genius of the Academy.

In 1884 he obtained state permission to copy paintings here at the Musee du Luxembourg, as well as the Louvre and the palaces of Versailles and Saint-Germain. The museum, next to the Palais du Luxembourg, was from 1871 the original home of most of the 19th-century paintings and sculpture that now reside at the Musee d’Orsay. Today it features temporary exhibitions arranged through the Ministry of Culture and the Senate.

A photo of the Douanier from about 1880.

From May 15 through July 15, 1884, the first Salon des Independants was held at the Palais Polychrome next to the new Palais de l’Industrie on the Champs Elysees. What would become an annual show for young talents — with none of the official Salon restrictions on style and subject matter to overcome — was the window through which Rousseau would emerge as an artist.

Many years later he would paint this celebratory tableau, “Liberty Inviting Artists to Take Part in the 22nd Exhibition of the Societe des Artistes Independants”, seen here. The glowing gates of a great hall open to rows of artists, most in black suits and with dark hair and beards, like him.

In that first year, among 5,000 works by more than 400 artists, his “Carnival Evening”, a detail shown here (click it to see the whole), won praise from his fellow painters. It’s described in the Encyclopedia Britannica as “a masterpiece of its kind and an impressive beginning”. The critics, however, remained largely unimpressed for the next seven years as Rousseau exhibited 20 works with the Groupe des Independants, all the while remaining an “amateur” as he continued to work at the toll house.

In 1885, with heady news of African jungle explorations constantly in the papers and France now colonising Tunisia, it’s likely that Rousseau saw a major Paris exhibition of Eugene Delacroix’s work, and the depictions of tigers and lions no doubt had an impact.

Before Rousseau began exploring his steaming jungles, there were the demure forests. “Promenade in the Forest” from 1886 and “Rendezvous in the Forest” from ‘89, a detail seen here (click for the whole picture), both have mysterious figures getting up to something in enchanted wooded clearings. They were scorned by the Academy for artistic reasons, but had an undeniable poetic allure.

This — not Mexico or Africa or the South Pacific — is where Rousseau found his jungles. In was in fact quite common for amateur artists to hone their skills by replicating the flora and fauna of the Jardins des Plantes and the Botanical Gardens.

The menagerie here dated to 1794, its animals coming from the royal zoo at Versailles, the Duc d’Orleans’ private collection and various fairgrounds once the use of animals in street entertainment was banned. Today there are 240 mammals, 500 birds and 130 reptiles housed in several enclosures spread over 13 acres.

Rousseau would sketch the monkeys, buffalo and tigers, stuffed and otherwise, and the verdantly exotic plants and trees, and then in his paintings group together species native to different continents. He must have seen banana trees in the tropical greenhouses, but evidently decided that the fruit ought to be shown growing downward rather than up, as in “Fight Between a Tiger and Buffalo” from 1908, seen here (click the image to see it large and complete).

“When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream,” he told one writer.

The jardin fuelled his fire to create “Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)” in 1891, clickable detail seen here, which was actually his first jungle picture, and it earned him his first serious review, by fellow artist Felix Vallotton, who called it “the alpha and omega of painting”.

Having never had formal training, Rousseau concocted his own technique. He’d start at the top of the canvas and work his way down, one colour at a time. In his jungles there were 50 shades of green for foliage that sprouted from his imagination rather than any earthbound seed. Each leaf sprouts distinctly, but happily joins nature’s overall design, the branches celebrating in abstraction.

Within the lush forest, drama brewed or boiled. It was the Douanier’s take on the grand history of traditional academic painting. This is the gloriously unlikely “An American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla”, also known as “Tropical Landscape”, from 1910.

Rousseau wrote: “Nothing makes me happier than to contemplate nature and to paint it. Would you believe it that when I go out in 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’.”

There were in his work seams of Manet and Cezanne, Monet and certainly Gauguin, as well as Persian, Japanese and the mediaeval. His sumptuously dense, yet decorative vegetation is far removed from the impressionists’ airy landscapes, however. Below are “Le charme” and “Eve and the Serpent”.

It’s been speculated that in Rousseau’s big cats prowling the jungle there is a metaphor for the artist seeking his solo fortune in unknown territory, an outcast stalking prey against the odds.

He knew he was a babe in the woods of high art but sought to exploit his very naivete, and gradually, splitting open rules like coconuts, he stumbled on to a whole new way of looking at things. Here, a detail from “The Lion’s Repast” of 1907.

In 1889 Rousseau was so inspired by the reconstructions of Senegalese, Tonkinese and Tahitian landscapes at the Universal Exposition, the World’s Fair, that he wrote a play, a light comedy called “A Visit to the Exposition of 1889″, which, exposing his naivete in writing as well as painting, was never staged.

Mock tribal villages, whose inhabitants had been shipped in from French colonies around the world to recreate life in West Africa, or the East Indies, or Indochina were presented as a tourist display in the heart of Paris. Rousseau would have been influenced by scenes like these warriors putting on a show.

In 1890 Rousseau painted a self-portrait, “Myself: Portrait Landscape”, in which he stands, palette in hand, in a Parisian landscape, complete with the then-new Eiffel Tower. He may have been the first to paint the tower (although it’s well obscured), since most artists considered Eiffel’s work a blot on the landscape. Paul Gauguin, however, was one of the painting’s outspoken admirers.

Le Douanier claimed to be the originator of a new genre, the portrait landscape. His human sitters, found themselves immersed in jungle, or else cityscapes filled with the most modern contraptions.

“The Eiffel Tower”, from about 1898.

Below is Rousseau’s painting of the Pont de Grenelle, from 1892. Small urban scenes like this were his bread and butter, earning him enough to finance the large-scale canvases he submitted to the Salon.

The average Parisian wanted familiar views with which to decorate the home, and the Douanier obliged with tranquil cityscapes accented with signs of modernity.

The Statue of Liberty appears in several Rousseau paintings, as does Frederic Auguste Bartholdi’s sculptures, like the Lion of Belfort, stressing, as Liberty also does in New York Harbor, the ideal community of republics.

In his populated allegories he mixed the social classes, and often the French tricolour was patriotically waving, or at least the blue and red of the City of Paris. Below are “A Centennial of Independence”, from 1892, and “The Representative of Foreign Powers Arriving to Hail the Republic as a Sign of Peace”, dated 1907.

In “Centennial”, the Douanier commemorated the anniversary of the first French Republic by borrowing from an illustration in Le Petit Journal, for which he briefly worked. Peasants dance the farandole around three liberty trees amid the banners and bunting he added.

“Promeneurs dans un parc”

“Garden of Luxembourg, Chopin Monument” from 1909. Le Douanier would spend ages on each painting, so there isn’t a huge number of Rousseau paintings around. His constant financial struggle is evident even in the cracks in his work, the result of using cheap pigments as well as his technical ineptitude.

Though most famous for his jungle paintings, Rousseau covered a broad range: still-life, genre paintings, individual or group portraits, historical scenes and even a collection of farm and domestic animals. Here, “Meadowland”.

Continued in Part 2.

Image and information sources:

The photographs used here, including the painting images, came from the Tate Modern’s excellent online exhibit, and the painting images from Artchive, Ibiblio.com and Artcyclopedia.com.

The Dream of Henri Rousseau is one devotee’s engaging website, with links to a collection of hi-res painting images.

Text sources include Encyclopedia Britannica, the New Yorker and Artchive.