Dali House

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.

The critic Louis Roy wrote: “It has been for M Rousseau as for all innovators. He proceeds from himself alone. He has the merit, rare today, of being absolutely personal … What an obsession, what a nightmare! What a powerful impression of insurmountable sadness! One would have to be of bad faith to dare to pretend that the man capable of suggesting ideas like these is not an artist.”

Alfred Jarry introduced Rousseau to the more intellectual side of Paris society and, helpfully, deferred payments on a house for him here at 14 Avenue du Maine. But financial problems beset Rousseau in 1896, debts mounting with his supplier of art materials, and the following year his son Henri-Anatole died. The year after that he offered his 1897 painting “The Sleeping Gypsy” to the mayor of Laval, seeking official patronage, but was spurned.

The painting (click on the detail to see the whole image) shows a lion with its mane growing backwards, transfixed by a woman snoozing in a desert lit by a smiling moon, with a jug and mandolin nearby. The gypsy’s face is childishly rendered, the stripes of her dress and the lion’s mane decorative, almost abstract.

“The painting, however, is wonderfully expressive,” notes the Encyclopedia Britannica. “The woman’s smile, the lion’s staring eye, the bare, unearthly landscape, and the whimsical twist at the end of the lion’s tail unite opposing feelings of peace and danger, and of solemn mystery and whimsy, into a powerful expression of magical enchantment.”

The Douanier wrote on the frame, “The feline, though ferocious, hesitates to pounce upon its prey, who, overcome by fatigue, lies in a deep sleep.”

Here, a detail from a wedding tableau called “La Noce”.

Laval’s mayor may have been disdainful of Rousseau’s offer of “The Sleeping Gypsy”, and the critics sullen, but the young avant garde – Robert Delaunay, Pablo Picasso and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire among them – were becoming his staunch defenders. Picasso was about to have his first exhibition in Paris, and it wouldn’t be long before people noticed the subtle connection in their styles.

Picasso had come across a painting by Rousseau being sold on the street, just for the canvas to be painted over, and was immediately impressed enough to arrange a meeting. Shown here is “The Muse Inspiring the Poet” from 1909, the Douanier’s portrait of Apollinaire and the painter Marie Laurencin.

In 1898 Rousseau leased a studio opposite Gauguin’s on the rue Vercingetorix. Here in the company of his second wife, Josephine Noury, whom he married the next year, he continued to struggle with his art while trying to make ends meet with a part-time job selling ads and doing lurid covers for Le Petit Journal. Later he taught drawing and ceramics at the city’s adult-education centre.

Rousseau did a pair of portraits of himself and Josephine, who died in 1903, and both were purchased – and treasured – by Pablo Picasso, who’s pictured in 1965 with them at his country house in Notre Dame de Vie.

The Douanier’s comfort with the industrial trappings of the modern era was evident in several of the urban scenes he painted, including “The Chair Factory at Alfortville” from 1898, seen here.

In 1904, his financial debts continuing to mount, he returned to his jungle motif after almost a decade of exploring other genres, with “Scouts Attacked by a Tiger”. The following year he was invited to participate in the Salon d’Automne, a semi-official exhibition created after a schism among the academicians.

Rousseau’s “The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope” (click on the detail to see the whole painting), more than nine by six feet in size, hung in the same room as the works of younger, boundary-pushing artists who came to be collectively called les Fauves, or the Wild Beasts – among them Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck. It’s quite possible that the critic who gave them the name (intended as an epithet) had Rousseau’s contribution in mind.

He was accused of assassinating impressionism, but here, at last, most viewers began to see the Douanier in a positive light. Ambroise Vollard, the city’s most important dealer in modern paintings, started buying his work. Success was at hand.

Biographies state that in 1906 Rousseau moved to 2 bis rue Perrel in Montparnasse, a single room overlooking the railway tracks of the Garre Montparnasse, where he would remain until his death. “Rue Perrel”, however, appears on no Paris maps I’ve seen; perhaps it’s been renamed.

Following his high-profile trial on a charge of bank fraud in 1909 Rousseau’s popularity surged and he began hosting soirees here, serving aperitifs and cookies to important patrons of the arts, men of letters and avant-garde artists. Sometimes these would include a music recital, Rousseau on violin, Georges Braque on accordion, or a poetry reading by Apollinaire. In the group photo here, the Douanier is seated on the left.

This charming tableau depicts Rousseau riding in the carriage of his “rue Perrel” neighbours, the Junier family. He places himself in front next to Claude Junier, a grocer, holding the reins of the white mare Rosa. Behind them are Claude’s wife Anna, upon whose family snapshots, taken in the nearby Clamart forest, this would have been based, and the couple’s nephew and niece. The Juniers’ three dogs come along for the outing, one on board.

Rousseau’s “Quai d’Ivry”, from about 1907, includes the airship La Patrie, launched the year before as the most advanced military aircraft in the world and a source of national pride. “Yet rather than gaze in wonder or flee in terror from this technological marvel,” a Tate Modern curator noted, “the strolling Parisians in Rousseau’s painting barely notice it as it hovers benignly in a peaceful summer sky”.

In 1907 “The Snake Charmer”, a painting commissioned by Robert Delaunay’s mother, Berthe Comtesse de Delaunay, drew praise at the Salon d’Automne, but just as his star seemed in the ascendant, a musician friend named Sauvagent took advantage of his naivete and persuaded him to collaborate in a bank fraud. The crime made headlines, with Rousseau writing letters in his defence from a jail cell. He spent a month in prison, though not necessarily here at the Palace of Justice.

At his trial on January 9, 1909, that same naivete got him off the hook. Laughter broke out frequently in the packed courtroom as his scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings about him, good and very bad, were read aloud, his artistic skill being denigrated more often than not. He was fined 100 francs and given a two-year suspended sentence, but it was generally acknowledged that his simplicity had saved him from prison. He was perhaps, after all, naive like a fox, a charmer of sorts himself.

Click on this detail of “The Snake Charmer” to see the whole painting, in which the dark, undulating figure of the flautist dances in a tangle of wildlife framed by “a wave of flickering grass tongues”, as one observer put it.

To celebrate his friend’s salvation from prison, Picasso, who had just completed “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon”, joined with Apollinaire to stage a banquet for Rousseau in his studio here at Le Bateau-Lavoir on Rue Ravignan. The Spaniard decorated the place with Chinese lanters for the “half-serious, half-burlesque” feast, which became legendary as “le banquette Rousseau”. It’s engagingly reconstructed by Arnee Greenberg in an article written for the travel website Bonjour Paris,

Picasso had just bought the Douanier’s “Portrait of a Woman” from a second-hand store (for five francs), and it had pride of place on display as Rousseau, unfazed by the “roasting” he received, sat on a makeshift throne while Apollinaire recited a poem he’d written on a napkin:

You recall, Rousseau, the Aztec landscape
the forests where mango and pineapple grow.
Where monkeys spill red blood of the pastecos
And the fair-haired Emperor was harried and slain?
The pictures that you painted you captured in Mexico –
Red sun and green banana leaves
Hereafter the brave soldier’s uniform, Rousseau’s
You changed for the Douanier’s upright blue.

Picasso stood on a chair to declare the banquet officially underway. Andre Salmon rose to recite “Ode to Rousseau”: “We are gathered to celebrate your fame, and so let us drink the wine Picasso is pouring to honour you, for it is time to drink it, crying all in chorus, ‘Long live! Long live Rousseau!’.”

Rousseau played his violin and thanked Picasso: “You and I are the greatest painters of our time,” he said. “You in the Egyptian style, I in the modern.”

“They sang and drank huge quantities of wine,” Greenberg writes. “A fight broke out. Salmon was carried out. There was cheering and wild applause. Finally Rousseau fell asleep. A candle had been dripping on his head. He had to be taken home in a cab. Rousseau, deeply moved, drove away with tears in his eyes.”

“Picasso called ‘Portrait of a Woman’ ‘one of the most truthful French psychological portraits’,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the New Yorker in January 2006. “That judgement may have been sly – the woman looks to be something of a battle-axe – but the composition is majestic, and Picasso never parted with it.” The Spaniard moved the painting with him from residence to residence for the next 65 years, until his death in 1973.

Little has been reported of Rousseau’s travels around France, though it’s clear that he did managed to get away from Paris, particularly in his later years. Above left, a view of La Falaise on the west coast, then as now a popular vacation spot. On the right is “The Boat in the Storm”, painted sometime after 1895. Again, it should be remembered that Rousseau never travelled beyond France, let alone on a voyage at sea. This scene would be a fancy of the Douanier’s imagination.

“The Banks of the Bievre Near Bicetre” from 1908-1909, elsewhere titled “Springtime in the Valley of The Bievre” but confused by the myriad art-poster shops online.

Joseph Brummer was already one of the leading art collectors of the day when Rousseau painted his portrait in 1909. A sculptor taught by Rodin, he opened galleries in Paris and New York and helped William Randolph Hearst build his storied collection.

Below, strolls in the urban pleasurelands. “Walking in Montsouris Park” from 1910 on the left and “Avenue in the Park at Saint-Cloud” from 1908.

Continued in Part 3.