Description
| Year of creation: | 1909 |
| Original size: | 47 cm x 38 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg |
Jardin du Luxembourg, 1909
Jardin du Luxembourg is the smallest work on our Rousseau shelf and the only one showing a specific Paris place the painter visited regularly. The 1909 canvas belongs to the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg and measures 47 x 38 cm.
A monument among trees
The scene shows a corner of the Luxembourg Gardens with the monument to the composer Frédéric Chopin, erected in the park in 1900. Small figures in dark coats walk in front of it while the crowns of the trees close overhead. Rousseau painted the park as he saw it every day: without drama, without beasts and without invented vegetation. That is exactly what makes the work valuable within his output, because it shows the same method applied where the motif did not have to be assembled from books. He had retired by then and had one year left to live. A related Paris subject without a jungle is The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre.
A small canvas, the same construction
Despite its size the picture is built by the same rules as the large jungles: the foliage is painted leaf by leaf, the outlines stay sharp even at the back, and depth is carried by the size of the figures alone. The monument is set frontally, as an object rather than as architecture in space. That consistency is why Rousseau’s small works cannot be mistaken for a Sunday painter’s: the method is the same whatever the format. The same quiet register is in Meadowland.
The hand-painted reproduction
A painter carries out the work on canvas, onto gallery canvas, in the size you choose. Because the original is very small, larger formats reveal detail that is almost impossible to see in the source; the painter works from the original and the proportions stay the same. 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 Football Players. Another Paris park, with the same small strollers and a pavilion set frontally, is View of Montsouris Park, the Kiosk.
- Motif: the Chopin monument in the Luxembourg Gardens with small walkers
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted
- Sizes: from 47 x 38 cm to 150 x 120 cm
- Point of interest: the original measures only 47 x 38 cm and is the smallest work on this shelf
