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Rousseau
Biography - 1844-1910
Henri Rousseau was a self-taught Sunday painter who began intensive
painting when he was 40 years old. At his times he was belittled and
even today some art critics regard his art as something nice to look at
but not as serious art. Henri's big drawback was his background. He
came from the working class.
Le Douanier
Henri Julien Rousseau was born in Laval in Northern France into a family of
a plumber. As a kid Henri showed an interest in arts, both music and
drawing. He would have liked to become an artist but with the modest means
of his family it was nothing but a dream. Henri finished the Lycee, a kind of
high school. And for a short time he worked for a lawyer before he joined the
French army in 1863. Later he would claim that he had served in Mexico.
But art historians agree that this was nothing else but a fiction.
In 1868 Rousseau took a minor job at the French Customs department where
he collected customs fees at a toll station from the local farmers who brought
their merchandise to the Paris markets. This gave him later his nickname le
douanier, the customs inspector.
His job as a customs collector gave him enough time to paint. In 1884
Rousseau had obtained a permit to make copies and sketches in the National
museums of Paris. In 1885 two of his paintings were exhibited at the Salon
des Champs-Elyssees. From 1886 until his death he exhibited every year at
the Salon des Independents. This was the exhibition platform of the avantgarde artist in contrast to the Salon des Artists Francais, which represented
the "official", classical art. The Salon des Independents had no jury and
admission procedure and every artist could exhibit for a fee.
The Grandfather of Naive Painting and Surrealism
In 1893 Henri Rousseau took the chance to retire at the age of 49 on a small
pension to realize his dream of becoming a full-time artist. Henri tried to
supplement his pension by giving violin and painting lessons and by making
portraits on commission. He earned some extra money as a street musician.
The Leitmotiv of Henri Rousseau's paintings are scenes of the jungle and
wild animals like tigers, monkeys or buffalos. Today it is assumed that he
painted the jungle landscapes after the images of the Botanical Garden in
Paris. And the images of wild beasts were painted from photographs and
after a drawing book of his daughter. On one of his paintings the bananas are
shown growing upside-down and on other paintings he grouped different
animals that in reality live on different continents and could never have been
seen in this combination.
Rousseau was self-taught in every way. Even his painting technique was
different. He painted the different colors one by one - first the blues and then
the greens and so on - and he painted from top to bottom of the canvas.
Towards the end of his life his painting style showed no substantial changes.
But it had developed - into depicting imaginative, unrealistic worlds. And the
motif of dream appeared in his late paintings. The surrealist movement
would later consider Rousseau as one of their forerunners.
Henri Rousseau - the Outsider
Somehow Henri Rousseau got the attention of some professional avant-garde
artists. The discussion whether they took him serious or if he was only some
kind of exotic amusement for them fills many books. Toulouse-Lautrec,
Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin and later Pablo
Picasso, Georges Braques and Wassily Kandinsky certainly appreciated his
works.
It is astonishing and impressive at the same time how this man from the
working class and without any academic art training was able to find a style
of his own and how he was immune against adopting anything from the
avant-garde artists around him. From an outsider who finally got some
limited acceptance, you would expect some eager readiness to absorb the
styles of the established art world or to experiment with the trendy styles of
his avant-garde comrades like impressionism, post-impressionism, fauvism
or cubism. Not so for Henri. And this makes him so unique.
The Banquet
In 1908 several artists under the leadership of Picasso organized a banquet in
honor of Henri Rousseau. Many great names of avant-garde art attended the
banquet, among them Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay and Wilhelm Uhde.
Picasso appreciated Henri Rousseau and for Henri it meant a lot to be a part
of the avant-garde artist circles. Rousseau was seemingly unimpressed by the
derision with which he was treated by art critics. He considered himself to be
a great artist. Two years before his death he said to Picasso:
Henri Rousseau
“Pink Candle”