- Byname:
- le Douanier (French: “the Customs Officer”)
- Born:
- May 21, 1844, Laval, France
- Died:
- Sept. 2, 1910, Paris (aged 66)
- Movement / Style:
- Der Blaue Reiter
Henri Rousseau
-
Who was Henri Rousseau?
Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) was a French painter and archetype of the modern naive artist. With no formal training, Rousseau worked as a tax collector until 1893, when he retired to paint full time.
Rousseau's paintings are known for their rich colors and meticulous detail, often depicting lush jungles, wild beasts, and exotic figures. His works, initially ridiculed, gained respect from avant-garde artists like Paul Signac. In 1905, after exhibiting with the Fauves, Rousseau garnered critical acclaim. Intellectuals and artists alike admired his unusual style, with his principal supporter being the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
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What kind of art was Henri Rousseau known for?
Henri Rousseau, a French painter, stands as the archetype of the modern naive artist. Without formal training, he is celebrated for his vividly colored and meticulously detailed paintings. Rousseau's art often depicted lush jungles, exotic figures, and wild beasts.
Rousseau's unique style gained recognition when he exhibited with the Fauves in 1905, earning the admiration of avant-garde artists. His notable works include The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) and The Dream (1910), which showcase his descriptive and expressive skill, revealing his powerful imagination.
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What is special about Henri Rousseau’s painting style?
Henri Rousseau's painting style is characterized by his status as a modern naïve artist, marked by a lack of conventional expertise. His works often feature detailed, lush jungles, exotic figures, and wild beasts, rendered with rich colors.
Rousseau's style includes a distinct absence of perspective, creating a floating effect, and figures are typically depicted full face or in strict profile. Despite his technical limitations, his art is celebrated for its expressive quality, blending peace and danger, mystery and whimsy. Although initially ridiculed, he later gained recognition from avant-garde artists like Picasso and was admired for his unique vision and self-taught approach.
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Which subjects did Rousseau often choose for his artworks?
Henri Rousseau often chose subjects like lush jungles, wild beasts, and exotic figures for his artworks. His service in the military allowed him to meet soldiers who had been to Mexico. Their vivid descriptions inspired the exotic landscapes that became one of his major themes.
Rousseau's painting The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) portrays a woman asleep in a moonlit desert with a lion standing over her. During his last years, he painted exotic landscapes, depicting a profusion of plant growth with attention to detail. He also included colorful birds and mysterious animals.
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How was Rousseau’s work received by other artists and critics during his lifetime?
Initially met with ridicule, Henri Rousseau's art gained recognition among avant-garde artists and intellectuals later in his life. In 1886, the Salon des Indépendants displayed his paintings, but critics mocked his style, which was far from the academic naturalism he sought to emulate.
Alfred Jarry, a writer, recognized Rousseau's unique talent and introduced him to the avant-garde circle associated with Le Mercure de France, which published an article praising Rousseau. Young painters like Robert Delaunay and Pablo Picasso, along with poet Guillaume Apollinaire, admired his work. In 1905, the semiofficial Salon d’Automne invited Rousseau to exhibit with the Fauves, which led to positive reviews. Picasso even hosted a banquet in Rousseau's honor in 1908, celebrating his work among sophisticated artists and critics.
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How did Henri Rousseau influence later generations of artists?
Henri Rousseau, a French painter, gained recognition after his death, with a retrospective exhibition in 1911 at the Salon des Indépendants.
Rousseau's work influenced 20th-century artists and inspired an interest in naive art. His simplified forms and use of space and symbol were admired by avant-garde artists like Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, and Henri Matisse. Wassily Kandinsky wrote admiringly about Rousseau in Der Blue Reiter, an Expressionist review. He is also thought to have influenced the dreamscapes of Surrealist artists such as Paul Delvaux and Max Ernst.
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Henri Rousseau (born May 21, 1844, Laval, France—died Sept. 2, 1910, Paris) was a French painter who is considered the archetype of the modern naive artist. He is known for his richly colored and meticulously detailed pictures of lush jungles, wild beasts, and exotic figures. After exhibiting with the Fauves in 1905, he gained the admiration of avant-garde artists.
Early life
Rousseau, the son of a tinsmith, came from a modest background. He was a mediocre student, and he left the secondary school in Laval without having completed his studies. He soon entered military service, in which he remained for four years. During his term of service he met soldiers who had survived the French expedition to Mexico (1862–65) in support of Emperor Maximilian, and he listened with fascination to their recollections. Their descriptions of the subtropical country were doubtless the first inspiration for the exotic landscapes that later became one of his major themes. The vividness of Rousseau’s portrayals of jungle scenes led to the popular conception, which Rousseau never refuted, that he traveled to Mexico. In fact, he never left France.
Civil service career and early paintings
Released from military service upon the death of his father (to support his widowed mother), Rousseau settled in 1868 in Paris. The following year he married Clémence Boitard, the daughter of a cabinetmaker. In Paris he began a career as a petty official, eventually (in 1871) becoming a tax collector in the Paris toll office; from this post came the name by which he was well known in later years, le Douanier (“the Customs Officer”), in spite of the fact that the toll office had no real customs functions. Working as a bureaucrat and busy with family affairs, he still somehow found time to draw and paint. Although no works remain as evidence, he had probably drawn and painted since childhood, and his stated ambition was to be a painter in the style of the academicians of his day. In 1884 he obtained permission to copy paintings at the Louvre. In 1886 he exhibited some of his first paintings, not at the official Salon, which would never have admitted a painter of such naiveté, but at the Salon des Indépendants; this annual exhibition was established by young painters to allow themselves and others a chance to exhibit free from the narrow official Salon requirements of style and subject matter.
(Impressionist or not? Find out in our list of Artists Mistaken for Impressionists.)
The picture with which Rousseau made his debut at the Salon des Indépendants, Carnival Evening (1886), was a masterpiece of its kind and an impressive beginning for the artist. The approach to representation that he employed in this work is typical of “naive art.” Everything is literally and deliberately drawn—every branch of the trees is traced, the clouds have a curious solidity, and greater attention is paid to the details of costume than to the figures themselves. The design of Rousseau’s painting, however, is effectively poetic, and he achieved a striking quality of atmosphere and mood through his accurate and sensitive observation of the colors of the evening.
In spite of this auspicious beginning, Rousseau’s work still went largely unnoticed, except for the consistent ridicule of the critics, for the next seven years. During this period he exhibited some 20 paintings at the Salon des Indépendants, but he remained essentially an amateur, dividing his time among painting, work at the toll house, and family life. His wife, who had been ill for some time, died in 1888, and within several years he lost all of his family except for a daughter, whom he sent to live with relatives.
This period of personal hardship was also a period of increased artistic activity for Rousseau. An important event in his life at this time was the Universal Exposition held in Paris in 1889; it is probable that the reconstructions of Senegalese, Tonkinese, and Tahitian landscapes at the exposition provided further inspiration for the exoticism of his later paintings. Rousseau’s enthusiasm for the fair was so great that he wrote a vaudeville play entitled A Visit to the Exposition of 1889, which he did not succeed in having produced. In this play, as in other theatrical works he wrote, his naiveté revealed itself even more than in the technical aspects of his painting. Also revealed, however, was his intense desire to express himself artistically; he even attempted to compose music. Still, his only great gift was for painting.
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The most important work of this period in Rousseau’s career is his self-portrait, Myself: Portrait-Landscape (1890). Standing in the foreground, palette in hand, Rousseau is surrounded by the Parisian landscape, which is painted with great accuracy. This was obviously intended as a “portrait of the artist” in the academic tradition; the seriousness of purpose is impressive in spite of the naiveté of execution.