Description
| Year of creation: | 1886 |
| Original size: | 89.6 cm x 117.4 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA |
A Carnival Evening, 1886
A Carnival Evening is the earliest major Rousseau on our shelf and the scene with which he first appeared at the Salon des Indépendants in 1886. The canvas belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and measures 89.6 x 117.4 cm.
Two figures in winter dusk
At the edge of a bare winter wood stand two figures in carnival costume, one in white with a ruffled collar, the other in a light dress with a mask. Above them is a pale sky with a moon, and the branches are painted as a net of thin lines with no leaves. The scene is held quite still: nothing happens, neither figure gestures, and it is that silence which gives the picture its nocturnal, almost dreamed character. Rousseau was still employed by the Paris toll service at the time and painted around his work. A comparably calm figure composition is The Football Players.
How the winter is painted
Rousseau built winter with drawing rather than shadow. Every branch is a separate stroke laid over an already finished sky, so the wood reads as lace in front of a bright plane. There is no softening of outline with distance and no aerial perspective; depth is carried by the size of the figures alone. This is exactly what his contemporaries took for ignorance and what later painters read as an independent decision. The same approach to figures in space is visible in Child with Puppet (To Celebrate the Baby).
The hand-painted reproduction
We paint the motif by hand in oil, onto gallery canvas, in the size you choose. The painter works from the original; because the scene depends on the relation between two small figures and a wide net of branches, the proportions are held at every format. The canvas arrives stretched on a wooden stretcher frame and ready to hang, without an added frame. The full range is in the Henri Rousseau gallery, and a related night scene is The Sleeping Gypsy. The same frontally posed figures, gathered as for a photograph, appear in The Family.
- Motif: two figures in carnival costume before a bare winter wood
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted
- Sizes: from 50 x 60 cm to 150 x 190 cm
- Point of interest: painted in 1886, the year of Rousseau’s first appearance at the Salon des Indépendants
