Le Douanier’s Parisian jungle, 2
A little joie de vivre with “Happy Quartet” and “The Football Players”, both from 1908.
Second of three parts, continued from here.
This is “View of the Ile de la Cite, Paris”, painted sometime in the 1890s, an extraordinary scene from Rousseau’s imagination concocted in crimson paint and contrasts. It seems to suggest the destruction of the old city to make way for the new, but has also been interpreted as a representation of the mystery he always found in the City of Light.
Rousseau finally retired from the Octroi in 1893 to paint full-time. Just 49, he supplemented his small pension with part-time jobs and busking in the streets with his violin. Soon after he met the iconoclastic writer Alfred Jarry, who coincidentally also hailed from Laval (and would be buried in the same cemetery as Rousseau).
It was in fact Jarry, soon to be the infamous playwright of “Ubu Roi”, who gave him the nickname Le Douanier. In the avant-garde review Mercure de France, he praised Rousseau’s “War”, from 1894, seen above: “The black leaves that populate the purple clouds; the ruins, tumbling like pine cones among the corpses, translucent with lack of oxygen, littered with pale-beaked crows.”
With its striking use of allegory, the work, alluding to the Franco-Prussian conflict of 25 years earlier, almost prophetically broke from Romantic tradition and showed only the horror of battle – and it convinced many that Rousseau was much more than a minor landscapist. It marked the beginning of his recognition as a serious painter. See the rest.
