Henri Rousseau – Boy on the Rocks

Boy on the Rocks, 1895–1897

A child sitting on the points of the rocks

The canvas is upright and almost entirely filled by a single figure. The boy sits astride
the tops of grey-brown rocks that rise as a row of sharp triangular points. He is not
standing on the ground and is not sitting on a flat surface; the body rests on the points
themselves, so that the legs hang beside two neighbouring peaks. The effect is of a child
placed on the rocks rather than one who has climbed them. The lower two thirds of the
picture belong to the rocks, the upper third to the sky.

A black coat and striped stockings

The child wears a black buttoned coat with a wide lower edge, and from under it a striped
piece of cloth spreads across the lap in horizontal black and white bands. The same stripes
continue on the stockings, which cover both legs to the ankles, where they end in black
boots. That rhythm of stripes is the strongest pattern on the canvas: without it the dark
figure would be a single black plane, and instead the legs read as two banded shapes that
lead the eye down towards the rocks.

A face that is not a child’s

The head is large in relation to the body, the face pale and round, the hair dark and
smoothly combed. The eyes are dark and wide open, the mouth small and red. The expression is
not childlike: the figure carries the seriousness of an adult portrait, a habit of
Rousseau’s that appears elsewhere too, for instance in Child with Puppet (To Celebrate the Baby). It is exactly this mismatch
between the size of the body and the gravity of the face that gives the picture its unusual
tension.

Rocks, sea and a single cloud

The rocks are painted as a row of even points, without cracks and without detail, in grey
and brownish tones with soft transitions. At the left edge a narrow band of greenish blue
sea opens between them – the only hint of where we are. The sky is a pale blue-grey and
empty; at the upper right a single small pink cloud drifts. The lower right corner carries
the signature.

Between 1895 and 1897

The museum does not date the work to one year but gives a range, 1895/1897. This is
Rousseau’s mature period, when he was painting professionally and also took portrait
commissions. The support is recorded by the museum as linen rather than plain canvas; the
difference is in the fibre and we keep it here exactly as the museum wrote it. A comparably
placed outdoor portrait is The Past and the Present, and among the figure scenes there is The Football Players.

The museum and the record

The original is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington under accession number
1963.10.63, in the group its record names the Chester Dale Collection. The museum gives the
measurements as 55.4 x 45.7 cm and the technique as oil on linen. The Gallery published its
own photograph of the work under CC0, meaning the image is released free of any usage
restriction. Another Paris subject in our series is Jardin du Luxembourg.

How we make this canvas

We make the picture as a hand-painted oil on canvas reproduction, to order and in the size
you choose. The original is painted on linen; our reproduction is made in oil on artists’
canvas, which means the same method of laying on the paint, though not necessarily the same
fibre in the support. Because the work is done by hand, every copy differs a little from the
last. The canvas is stretched on a wooden frame and delivered ready to hang. The full range by this painter is in the Henri Rousseau gallery.