Dali House

Last of three parts, continued from here.

During his last years Rousseau stayed close to the exotic landscapes that made his reputation, all of them bursting with turgid plants and fine detail looming from the shadows.

In “The Merry Jesters”, above, from about 1906 (click on the detail to see the whole painting), the simians play with back-scratchers and a milk bottle. In another work from 1910, the denizens of “Tropical Forest with Monkeys” are fishing. Such anthropomorphism may have been a conscious attempt to remind man that his innocence was being robbed by modernisation.

In “Virgin Forest”, or “Negro Attacked by a Jaguar” (also clickable), the action at the centre of the painting and almost engulfed in the surrounding jungle. Despite the Douanier’s painting style being unrealistic, there is a different kind of realism at work here that’s disturbingly compelling.

This is a photo of the Douanier taken in his studio, at work on the picture.

There are more than 20 Rousseau jungle paintings, mostly from after 1904. Here, “The Flamingoes”, from 1907.

While other artists of Rousseau’s own generation left nature behind in pursuit of pictorial invention and imagination, he genuinely believed that what he painted was true to life.

It’s been reported that on occasion he bacame so enrapt in his work that he actually became alarmed at the fierce visions he was rendering on canvas. He would loudly sing to bolster his courage against the wild beasts he was creating. His friend Apollinaire said the Douanier “sometimes got so scared he began to tremble and had to rush to the window for air”.

Shown here is “Jaguar Attacking a Horse”. Click on the detail to see the whole painting.

After Gauguin died in 1903, retrospectives of his work triggered a vogue for tropical scenes, and Rousseau kept busy, churning out nearly 30 variations on the theme. Seen here is a detail from “Exotic Landscape” from 1908.

In both the Darwinian struggles of Rousseau’s tropic scenes and his (dis)placement of city-dwellers communing with the jungle, the Douanier was perhaps hinting of a means to renew man’s natural energy.

Here, “Woman Walking in the Forest” (click to see the whole thing).

A photo of the dying Douanier with “Forest Landscape with Setting Sun”.

At the 1910 Salon des Independants, general acclaim greeted “The Dream”, also known as “Yadivigha’s Dream”, and collectors were taking fresh interest in his work. Yadivigha was a Polish woman the Douanier had loved early on, who recurred in his tropical scenes, here surveying her habitat as regally as Manet’s “Olympia”.

The Encyclopedia Britannica’s description: “An enchanting nude rests 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 musician plays a flute behind her.

Rousseau’s explanation of this scene (click to see it much larger) is that the woman, having fallen asleep on the sofa, dreams that she is transported to this improbable region. This painting, which exhibits all of Rousseau’s descriptive and expressive skill, is a supreme revelation of his powerful and uncommon imagination.”

Rousseau sent “The Dream” to his friend Apollinaire and asked him to write a poem to accompany it. Apollinaire obliged: “Yadivigha in a beautiful dream, / While sleeping peacefully, / Heard the notes of a pipe / Played by a friendly snake charmer. / While the moonlight gleams / On the flowers and verdent trees, / The tawny snakes listen / To the gay tunes of the instrument.“

On September 2, 1910, suffering from gangrene, the result of an untreated leg wound, Rousseau died here at Necker Hospital, heartbroken and, despite new interest in his work, still impoverished. It’s possible that depression played a role in his demise. His financial problems had become severe, and yet he had lavished gifts on a shop clerk named Leonie; she merely scoffed.

In death, the tributes flowed, beginning with the 1911 Salon des Independants, with more than 40 works by Rousseau on view, followed by further homage at the first Blaue Reiter exhibition (the German group called him “the master”). Major shows were held in 1984-85 at the Grand Palais in Paris and at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in 2001 in Germany, and at the Tate Modern, Musee d’Orsay, National Gallery of Art in Washington and again at the Grand Palais in 2005-6.

While the Seine experienced its worst flooding in decades, Henri Rousseau was buried in a pauper’s grave here at the Cimetiere de Bagneux, just south of Paris, with just seven friends in attendance – the painters Paul Signac and Otiz de Zarate, Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonja Terk, the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, Rousseau’s landlord Armand Queval and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

In 1913 Brancusi and Ortiz de Zarate engraved Apollinaire’s memorial inscription on a headstone purchased by Delaunay and Picasso. It reads:

We salute you
Gentle Rousseau you can hear us
Delaunay his wife Monsieur 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 sacred leisure in the
light of truth Painting
as you once did my portrait
Facing the stars

The Cimetiere de Bagneux opened in 1886 and was the site of Oscar Wilde’s grave until his remains were moved to Pere Lachaise in central Paris. Amedeo Modigliani’s lover and model Jeanne Hebuterne was also briefly interred here after she committed suicide when he died in 1920. Her remains too were transferred to Pere Lachaise to rest beside those of Modigliani.

Rousseau’s influence can be read in Picasso, Fernand Leger and the Surrealists Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst and Joan Miro. He’s been seen as a collagist, perhaps even anticipating pop art in his elevation of the mundane. Other than Delvaux, all of these people rank far above him on the mercenary chart at http://www.artfacts.net/ , which adjudicates by the number of recent shows and buyer interest. Picasso is of course #1. The Douanier is #724 … though interest appears to be on the rise.

And why not? For all their contradictions and confounding preposterousness, the Douanier’s paintings are, more often than not, simply lovely. As simple and reassuring as a forest.

This is Robert Delaunay’s “Portrait of Douanier Rousseau”, painted a few years after he died.

Image and information sources:

The photographs used here 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.

An interesting film to look out for, should it go on general release, is the documentary produced by the US National Gallery of Art for the 2006 exhibition “Jungles of Paris”, a show mounted by the Tate Modern and Musée d’Orsay. Narrated by Kevin Kline, it features archival and present-day footage of the Parisian parks, gardens, and greenhouses that fuelled Rousseau’s imagination.