Works by Henri Rousseau
79 works · 110 ms
Henri Rousseau, called Le Douanier after his job taxing goods coming into Paris, painted thick jungles without ever leaving France, working from the city's botanical glasshouses, children's picture books and stuffed animals.
He had no academic training and began to paint seriously only in his early forties. Nature, he said, was his one teacher, though he owned to some advice from Jean-Léon Gérôme and Félix Auguste Clément. From 1886 he showed regularly at the Salon des Indépendants, and critics at first mocked him. Tiger in a Tropical Storm was shown in 1891: rain falls in thin silver streaks while the tiger crouches in bent grass with its teeth bared. Félix Vallotton gave it his first serious review, but over a decade went by before he painted another jungle.
He retired at 49 to paint full time. Next to the jungles came small views of Paris and its suburbs, and what he called a new kind of picture, the portrait-landscape. In Myself: Portrait – Landscape of 1890 he stands on a quay in black with palette and brush, a ship hung with flags, a bridge and the Eiffel Tower behind him. Paintings make up nearly everything below, most of it painted after 1900, led by landscapes, portraits and animals.
In Tropical Forest with Monkeys, from the final months of his life, flat leaves overlap in many greens, and the two central monkeys hold sticks from which lines seem to hang, like fishing rods. He showed his last painting, The Dream, in March 1910: a nude woman lies on a sofa in a moonlit jungle of giant flowers. He died in Paris that September.
Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery, National Gallery of Art, National Gallery Prague.
