Henri Rousseau – Landscape With Milkmaids

Landscape With Milkmaids – a hand-painted reproduction

Two enormous trees with pale grey trunks stand at the left and the right; their heavy
limbs spread into dense bright-green crowns that fill the top of the picture, with patches of
white sky showing between the leaves. Between them lies a green clearing, and on it: a pale
donkey at the left facing right, a black-and-white cow with its head down, a grey-white horse
and a small black dog. At the far left stands a woman in a dark dress, white cap and apron.
Right of centre are a woman in a white cap, blue skirt and ochre apron, and a smaller figure
in a dark dress and white cap beside her. A dark metal gate stands at the right edge. Behind
them a strip of meadow carries a rust-orange shape. A pale sandy path curves across the
foreground.

Two trees carrying everything

The structure of this canvas is unusually simple: two verticals at the edges and all the
life between them. The trunks act as a frame inside the frame, so the eye does not leave the
picture but circles the clearing – from the donkey to the cow, to the horse, to the three
figures. On a wall that means the canvas frames itself and does not need much space around
it; it sits well between two windows or above a piece of furniture of roughly its own width.
For the opposite solution, where trees form a long avenue instead of two columns, see
The Banks of the Oise.

The third grazing picture on this shelf

There are now three canvases here with animals in a meadow, and all three solve the same
problem differently. In Scene in Bagneux on the Outskirts of Paris the animals are strung out in a line and the space opens
into depth; in The Avenue in the Park at Saint-Cloud the scene is shallow and still, with haystacks instead of trees;
here the clearing is enclosed, almost a yard. If you collect by motif they can hang together
– they are different enough not to repeat one another.

What it means that the source is a gallery photograph

The original measures 41.3 cm x 52.7 cm. The publicly available image of this work is a
photograph taken in the museum, not the museum scan we use elsewhere, and its colour is the
colour of gallery light. We say so plainly, because the painter works from that image. The
drawing, the arrangement and the shapes are entirely clear, which is what matters most for a
hand-painted reproduction. To see a scene where a meadow carries the canvas with almost no
trees at all, look at Meadowland.

How a hand-painted reproduction is made

Every canvas is hand-painted in oil, to order, in the size you choose. The painter works
from the best available image of the original, layer by layer, so that the white cap, the
ochre apron and the pale trunks stay readable even at smaller sizes. Because this is
handwork, two canvases of the same size are always slightly different; that is not a fault
but the difference between a painting and a print. Prices start at 124 EUR for the smallest
sizes on this page.