Henri Rousseau – The Canal

The Canal (Le canal)

A canal running straight into the distance

The canvas is landscape and is built out of a single move: a canal that runs from the
bottom edge straight into the depth and narrows to a pale wedge towards the centre. The
water is a pale grey with brownish passages and carries soft, drawn-out reflections of the
banks. Because it runs exactly down the middle and because the two banks close in evenly,
the whole composition leads the eye to one point on the horizon without offering it any
other stop on the way.

The two banks

Pale, pinkish-grey towpaths run beside the water, and behind them a band of green grass.
Further back stand rows of trees – in this scene almost bare, so that the branches read as a
dense rust-brown haze rather than as crowns. This is not a summer scene; the trees are bare
and what is left of the leaves gives both sides a rusty colour that is the warmest note on
the canvas.

Evenly spaced shapes

Along both banks small dark spiky shapes are set at regular intervals – young trees or
shrubs, each with a few sticking-out branches. Because they are spaced alike they work as a
measure: they show how quickly the space recedes. That repeating rhythm is what gives a
quiet scene its order, much as the avenue does in Jardin du Luxembourg.

What lies in the distance

Where the canal narrows, small dark shapes are visible on the water – too small to be
named with any confidence. Beyond them a pale flat plane opens, out of which rises a group
of slender dark conifers, and low grey ridges lie along the horizon. The sky is an even pale
grey, without cloud, and takes the upper third of the picture.

Colour that is barely there

This is one of Rousseau’s most withheld canvases: grey water, grey sky, rusty trees and a
single band of green. There is no strong colour anywhere, which is the opposite of his
tropical scenes. That is exactly why the difference between the warm brown and the cool grey
is what carries the whole picture. A comparably restrained river subject on our shelf is
The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre, and an open landscape is Meadowland.

The museum and the record

The original is held by the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven under accession
number 1980.12.12, in the group its record names the Katharine Ordway Collection. The museum
gives the technique as oil on canvas and the measurements as 32.7 x 41 cm, and separately
gives the measurements with the frame; the figure quoted here is the painting itself. The
museum does not date the work to a particular year but places it in the 19th century, so we
give no year either. The record also states that the canvas is signed at the lower left
“H. Rousseau”, which is where it can be seen. A suburban subject in our series is Outskirts of Paris.

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. In this subject everything depends on the greys: if the water is a shade too
warm or the sky a shade too dark, the scene loses its cold quiet and becomes an ordinary
landscape. So the colours are mixed in small quantities and compared side by side before
they go on the canvas. Because the work is done by hand, every copy differs a little from
the last. The full range by this painter is in the Henri Rousseau gallery.