Description
| Year of creation: | 1903 |
| Original size: | 81 cm x 100 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland |
Child with Puppet (To Celebrate the Baby), 1903
Child with Puppet is one of the strangest works Rousseau made and the only portrait of a child on our shelf. The 1903 canvas belongs to the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland and measures 81 x 100 cm. It is also known by its French title, Pour fêter le bébé!
A child who does not look like a child
A child in a white gown stands in a meadow, a puppet in one hand and a flower in the other. The head is disproportionately large and the face is adult: this is not an image of an infant but a small person with a serious, almost severe expression. That disproportion was a reason for ridicule when the picture was made and is now taken as part of Rousseau’s language rather than as an error. Behind the figure is a meadow strewn with small blossoms, each painted separately, and a low horizon with no buildings. A comparable figure placed in empty space is A Carnival Evening. The work was commissioned as a family portrait and is said to have been given away later in place of a bill, though we cannot confirm that detail from a primary source.
How the scene is built
Rousseau set the child frontally and full length, as in a photographic portrait of the period. There is no shadow underfoot, and the horizon sits high enough that the figure fills almost the whole height of the canvas. The blossoms are spaced evenly across the plane rather than in perspective, which takes the depth out of the meadow and turns it into a pattern. That flatness is what separates Rousseau’s portraits from the bourgeois painting of his time. The same approach to the figure is visible in The Football Players. Another child portrait set out of doors is Boy on the Rocks.
The hand-painted reproduction
The reproduction is produced in oil, by hand, in oil on canvas, in the size you choose. The painter works from the original, so the relation of head to body and the spacing of the blossoms stay unchanged at smaller formats. 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 figure scene is The Sleeping Gypsy.
- Motif: a child with a puppet and a flower on a flowering meadow
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted
- Sizes: from 40 x 50 cm to 150 x 180 cm
- Point of interest: the outsized head and adult face drew ridicule at first and are now read as part of the painter’s language
