“While the moon reflects / on the flowers, the verdant trees, / the wild beasts and other animals lend an ear / to the gay sounds of the instrument.”
Henri Rousseau
Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), known to his contemporaries as Le Douanier, the customs officer, was a self-taught French painter now regarded as the central figure of naive painting. This page holds 44 of his works, each hand-painted in oil on canvas to order in the size you choose, with prices from 124 EUR.
Rousseau worked for the Paris municipal toll service until he was forty-nine and gave himself to painting only after retiring in 1893. From 1886 he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, the only jury-free salon in Paris, and that salon is what let him reach an audience at all. He had no academic training, taking only some advice from the painters Félix Auguste Clément and Jean-Léon Gérôme.
He never left France and never saw any of the jungles he painted. He studied plants in the hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes, and animals at the zoo, in botanical books and illustrated magazines. His undergrowth is exact in its parts and impossible as a whole, and that gap is what later drew the Surrealists to him. Pablo Picasso discovered his work in 1908 and held a banquet in his honour at the Bateau-Lavoir studio; The Snake Charmer was commissioned from him by Berthe, Countess de Delaunay, mother of the painter Robert Delaunay. In 1905 his large canvas The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope hung at the Salon d’Automne in the same room as works by Matisse and Derain; the critic Louis Vauxcelles called the room a cage aux fauves, a cage of wild beasts, and from that remark the name Fauvism was born. Rousseau himself was not a Fauve.
Among the works on this page are The Dream of 1910, his largest and last canvas, held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Tiger in a Tropical Storm of 1891, the first of the jungle paintings, now in the National Gallery in London; A Carnival Evening of 1886, with which he first appeared at the Salon des Indépendants; and The Equatorial Jungle of 1909 from the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The still life Bouquet of Flowers belongs to the Tate Gallery in London, and The Merry Jesters to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Besides the jungles, this page also holds a large group of Paris subjects: suburban streets, canals, bridges, quaysides and parks, painted in the years when Rousseau was working for the city customs service on the edge of Paris. Among the jungle canvases are The Repast of the Lion, Scouts Attacked by a Tiger and Tropical Landscape: An American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla; The Wedding Party is the largest figure scene on the page, and The Waterfall is one of his late forest subjects.
Rousseau died on 2 September 1910, a few months after showing his last large canvas at the Salon. Every reproduction on this page is painted by hand from the original, in oil on canvas, stretched on a wooden frame and ready to hang.