Henri Rousseau – Environs de Paris

Environs de Paris, c. 1906–1910

A street at the edge of the city

The canvas is landscape and shows a broad street that runs in from the lower left corner
and curves away to the right. Its surface is a pale ochre and takes up almost the whole
lower third. On the left it is bounded by a long pinkish wall that runs across the middle of
the picture and has a dark arched gateway near its centre. On the right stands a pale
two-storey house with a red roof, two brick chimneys and pale green shutters, with a black
iron railing beside it.

Wires across the whole width

A wooden pole stands left of centre, and from it wires are strung right across the width
of the canvas. They are thin and almost easy to miss, yet it is they that place the scene in
its own time: this is not a village but a suburb that has just been wired. The museum’s
record names them as telephone wires. Rousseau did not hide them; he let them cross the
sky.

People on the road

The Barnes Foundation’s record counts four people and a buggy. On the canvas they can be
pointed out like this: at the lower left a woman in a dark dress with a white cap; near the
centre a man in a dark coat and a wide black hat with a stick; a dark hooded cart in front
of the arched gateway; and beyond it a woman in dark walking to the right. All the figures
are small and still; nobody hurries and nobody is talking.

Clouds that weigh more than the houses

The upper half is taken by a great mass of white and grey cloud with soft, inflated
edges; above it only a narrow band of pale blue sky shows. The museum describes this mass as
a “monumental soufflé of clouds” – the clouds are larger and more worked than any of the
buildings beneath them. That is exactly why the street reads as low and pressed against the
bottom edge.

Behind the wall

Above the wall one sees greenery, a white house with a red roof and a tall dark conifer.
That band is the only place where the scene shows depth; everything else is ordered into
parallel bands – road, wall, greenery, clouds – stacked one above the other like layers. The
same banded ordering appears in Outskirts of Paris, the other view of the Paris outskirts on our shelf.

The museum and the record

The original is held by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia under accession number
BF844. The museum records it as oil on canvas measuring 38 x 46 cm, dates it to about
1906-1910, and gives it under the English title Outskirts of Paris and the French
Environs de Paris. Because a different Rousseau already stands on our shelf under
the English title, this page carries the French one. The museum also records that Rousseau
worked as a customs clerk on the outskirts of Paris and may have depicted this
neighbourhood. Related subjects are The Canal and The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre.

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. Two things are demanding in this subject: the long horizontal of the wall, which
has to stay straight across the whole width, and the wires, which have to be drawn in one
movement – a broken wire gives the hand away at once. Because the work is done by hand,
every copy differs a little from the last. A park subject in our series is Jardin du Luxembourg. The full range is in the Henri Rousseau gallery.