Henri Rousseau
Biography of Le Douanier, French Primitive Naif Painter.
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The Dream (1910)
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
By Henri Rousseau.
A masterpiece of naive art and an
important work of French painting.

Henri Rousseau (1844-1910)

Contents

• Biography
• Customs Officer
• Primitivism
• Salon des Independants
• The Sleeping Gypsy
• Studio Work
• Collections

NOTE: For analysis of works by naif painters like Henri (Le Douanier) Rousseau, please see: Analysis of Modern Paintings (1800-2000).

The Sleeping Gypsy (1897)
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
By Henri Rousseau.

POST-IMPRESSIONISTS
See: Post-Impressionist Painters.

Biography

Arguably the greatest exponent of naive (naif) or primitive art, the self-taught French painter Henri Rousseau ("Le Douanier") was derided by art critics but much admired by other modern artists, including the colourist Henri Matisse, the Post-Impressionist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Cubist Robert Delaunay, as well as Pablo Picasso who championed the strong colour and child-like simplicity of his primitive landscape painting. Picasso hosted a dinner in the painter's honour in 1908, which duly triggered a wave of intellectual interest in the Rousseau's works, and elevated his primitivism to the level of high art. Associated with the Ecole de Paris, Rousseau was later revered by Surrealists in the 1920s for the surrealism of images such as The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), which is now one of the world's most popular posters of modern art. Other well-known paintings by Rousseau include: Surprised! (1891, National Gallery, London); The Monkeys (1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art); The Snake Charmer (1907, Musee d'Orsay); and The Dream (1910, MOMA, New York).

WORLDS TOP ARTISTS
For top creative practitioners, see:
Best Artists of All Time.
For the greatest view painters, see:
Best Landcape Artists.
For the greatest portraitists
see: Best Portrait Artists.

WHAT IS VISUAL ART?
For an explanation of the
terminology, see:
Art: Definition and Meaning.

WORLD'S GREATEST ART
For the best works, see:
Greatest Modern Paintings.

Customs Officer

The French painter Henri Rousseau was born in Laval, of petty bourgeois parents. He served in the French army (he was a clarinettist in the regimental band at Caen) for four years. He never in fact went to Mexico or served in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1), as he later claimed to have done. In 1869, he settled in Paris, where he eventually obtained a post as gatekeeper in the customs-house at the city gate (his nickname "Le Douanier", "The Customs Officer", rather overstates his office). In 1885, he resigned this post, took odd jobs such as painting inn-signs and devoted more time to his own painting.

Primitivism

Entirely self-taught as an artist, Rousseau did not in fact turn to art until relatively late in life. His first known work is Landscape With a Watermill (1879), painted when he was 35. Although his work was that of a primitive or "Sunday Painter", his own pretensions were to rival the Salon favourites of the day. Ironically, however, his work attracted the attention of the avant-garde: first Redon and Toulouse-Lautrec, then Alfred Jarry, and finally, in his last years, Picasso and Apollinaire. What he possessed above all was a complete confidence in the value of his painting. He once told Picasso that they were the only great contemporary artists, "I in the modern manner and you in the Egyptian."

Salon des Independants

His decision to devote his life to fine art painting coincided with the founding of the Salon des Independants in 1884. In that free, juryless exhibition, he showed between three and ten paintings almost every year from 1886 to 1910. The majority were landscape paintings and portraits.

His earliest known works are local views (for instance, of the customs house), naive in their perception of reality and in their detailed descriptiveness. But such seemingly direct reportage was followed by inventive, imaginative, and dream-like works. However obsessed he was with exact and particular detail, he was able to control his composition, subordinating what might have been a host of minute and disparate observations into a rhythmical whole. He worked slowly and carefully, applying many layers of paint and exotic jewel-like colour, and had a relatively small output.

The Sleeping Gypsy

One of Rousseau's best known pictures which has become one of the most famous images of modern times, The Sleeping Gypsy is stunning in the simplicity of it's composition and the subtlity of its execution. The beautiful multi-coloured figure of the gypsy sleeps peacefully, watched over by a lion, and the whole scene is bathed in the pale light of a full moon. The picture is intensely surreal and dreamlike, but also alarmingly direct, and real, and the image works on both levels of interpetation. Rousseau offered it for sale to his hometown of Laval at a price of 200 francs, but his offer was rejected as the painting was considered "too childish". It is now one of the best-loved examples of poster art.

Studio Work

Rousseau's famous jungle scenes and exotic Landscapes were not based (as he claimed) on his mythical Mexican experiences, but on the tropical flora and fauna that he found in books, or observed in the Jardin des Plantes botanical gardens in Paris. Equally, the exotic creatures inhabiting these forests - monkeys, water buffaloes, hunters, and dark-skinned natives - were reproduced from photographs, or from dolls and toys (for example, Merry Jesters, 1906; Philadelphia Museum of Art). One of his last works, The Dream (1910; Museum of Modern Art, New York) is a memory-image of his first love reclining on a sofa in one of his imaginary jungles. Its power and conviction, its sheer authenticity as dream-reality, foretells the best of Surrealist painting. Kandinsky called Rousseau the author of "new, greater reality", the complementary pole of the "new and greater abstraction". Rousseau remains the first and the greatest of the naive or primitive painters.

Collections

Works by Henri Rousseau hang in several of the world's best art museums, including the National Gallery London (Tiger in a Tropical Storm, 1891), and the Museum of Modern Art New York (The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897; The Dream, 1910), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (The Monkeys, 1906).

• For more biographies of Art Brut artists, see: Famous Painters.
• For more about modern French painting, see: History of Art.
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