Henri Rousseau

The artist Henri Rousseau was born on 21^st May 1844 in Laval, a town in the Loire Valley of north-western France. His working-class father, who is variously described as a tinsmith or a plumber, had problems making ends meet, and the family was often on the move when the rent could not be paid.

Henri was educated at the Lycee in Laval, where he was a passable, though not distinguished, student. On leaving school he was employed for a short time in the office of an attorney, but when some petty thefts came to light and the finger of blame was pointed in his direction, he decided that the safest place to be was in the Army, so he enlisted as a bandsman.

He spent four years in the Army, making little impression as a soldier, and there is no evidence that he ever served overseas or was engaged in any military action. It was later suggested that his paintings of jungle scenes resulted from his having travelled to exotic places during his four years’ service, but that would appear to be an invention.

In 1868 he left the army and took a job as a collector of tolls for the Paris Municipality. This was quite a menial role, and does not really justify the nickname of “Le Douanier” that he was later given, as this translates as “customs officer”, a much more prestigious job title. He stayed doing this job until 1893, when he felt secure enough to retire and devote himself entirely to art, although this did not look like a very sensible option at the time.

At the time that he left the army he married the 15-year-old daughter of a cabinet-maker, who was also his landlord. She was to bear him six children, although only one survived to adulthood. His wife died in 1888 and Rousseau only married again in 1898.

Henri Rousseau’s career as a painter began around 1877, which is when his earliest surviving paintings were dated. He is often credited as being a “naïve” or “primitive” artist, which implies that he had no formal training. It is true that he was largely self-taught, but he did admit to having had some coaching from two established artists, namely Félix Auguste Clément and Jean-Léon Gérôme.

In 1884 he was given a permit to copy paintings in the Louvre, and it was this experience that contributed most to his self-teaching. For his subject matter he used Paris street scenes and the animals and plants that he saw in the Botanical Gardens, plus a hefty dose of pure imagination. He also used images from popular books and journals as his inspiration.

Rousseau’s main showcase was the Salon des Indépendants, which had first been established in 1884 and to which Rousseau contributed in 1886 and annually thereafter. The great advantage of this Salon, for an unknown artist, was that there was no jury to vet the entries and the only condition for exhibiting a work was payment of a fee. Rousseau’s paintings were at first ridiculed, but gradually they became recognised as having merit and some influential artists began to make encouraging remarks about them.

However, it was only towards the end of his life that Henri Rousseau really became noticed as an artist in the same league as contemporaries in the avant-garde movement such as Braque and Picasso. The latter became an admirer of Rousseau’s work, and held a banquet in his honour in 1908.

Rousseau became an exhibitor at the Salon d’Automne from 1903, this being the leading showcase for post-Impressionists and “Fauvists” such as Matisse. It was in this environment, in which colour and shape meant more than realism and impression, that Rousseau found his true home.

His reputation, and sales of his paintings, were growing strongly when he died suddenly on 2^nd September 1910, aged 66, having contracted septicaemia from a cut on his leg. Despite the recognition he had acquired in his later years he was never a rich man and he had a pauper’s funeral. The artist Robert Delaunay, one of his greatest admirers, paid for his body to be reburied in a more respectable cemetery a year after his death.

Rousseau’s painting style was completely original and changed little during his lifetime. It was totally at odds with that of his Impressionist contemporaries, being based on well-defined shapes of objects such as people, animals and plants placed in imaginary environments. He painted many portraits, but these were far from realistic, with facial features often being crudely depicted and the images appearing flat and out of proportion.

Rousseau introduced what he called the “portrait landscape” in which a familiar scene was the framework for the portrait but with the latter being superimposed on the former. An example is his 1890 self-portrait in which he stands dressed all in black, holding a paintbrush and artist’s palette, on a road beside the Seine. A moored ship is festooned with flags which obscure the Eiffel Tower rising in the distance. Walking along the quayside, apparently not far from the artist, are two people; however, they are in proportion only to the ship and not to the main figure in the foreground, beside whom they are toy-like in size.

Rousseau is best known for his jungle scenes in which animals such as tigers appear surrounded by bizarre vegetation with huge leaves, strange fruits and imaginary flowers. Rousseau was not particularly interested in accuracy, in that he painted bananas growing downwards rather than upwards and animals in close proximity that could never meet in the wild.

He also, with a few notable exceptions (such as “Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)”), produced images that are strangely static. There is hardly any movement here, as though everything has become frozen in its place. People in a street scene do not walk but stand, animals stop and stare, and the trees are unmoved by any breeze.

It is hardly surprising that such paintings should have had a poor reception from their first viewers, given that they are, in many cases, faulty in one way or another. However, when viewed in a different context, namely that of the bringing together of abstract shapes and contrasting colours, there is clearly a different message coming from Rousseau’s work. The static, poorly depicted human figures look familiar to anyone who knows the work of L. S. Lowry, for example, and it is not a huge step from a painting such “The Dream” to the Surrealism of Dali and Magritte. Indeed, the trail from the Salon des Indépendants through Dadaism to Surrealism is an easy one to trace.

The work of Henri Rousseau is appealing to many people today because it is easy to “read” and his canvasses always have much in them to attract the viewer. They often appear childlike in their composition, and children enjoy looking at them because there is always something new and unexpected to find, such as a strange beast or bird that had not been noticed before. However, on another level there is also an erotic element in many of his canvasses, with defenceless women (often naked) being under threat from wild animals.

Rousseau’s paintings are now highly regarded and can be found in many of the world’s greatest galleries. It would surely have delighted the artist to know that some of his works now hang in the Louvre in Paris, where “”Le Douannier” taught himself to paint.

© John Welford