Description
| Year of creation: | 1910 |
| Original size: | 55 cm x 46 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Artizon Museum (formerly Bridgestone Museum of Art), Tokyo, Japan |
Meadowland, 1910
Meadowland is the quietest work on our Rousseau shelf: no beast, no figure and no event. The 1910 canvas belongs to the Artizon Museum in Tokyo and measures 55 x 46 cm. It was painted in the last year of the painter’s life.
A meadow without a narrative
The scene shows a piece of meadow with a few trees and a low horizon. There is no path leading into depth, no house to give scale and no person. Rousseau painted the grass as an even plane of small strokes and the trees as separate shapes set beside one another. Anyone who knows his jungles will recognise the same hand without the exotic: the same construction, only the material is domestic. It is that quietness which makes the work suit rooms where the large jungle canvases would be too loud. A related calm landscape subject is The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre. It was painted in the same year as The Dream and is more than five times smaller.
A museum that changed its name
The canvas is held by an institution known for decades as the Bridgestone Museum of Art, which reopened in January 2020 under its new name, Artizon. Older catalogues and online sources therefore still list it under the former name, which regularly causes confusion when searching for this work; the specification above gives both forms. The same procedure on another quiet subject is visible in Jardin du Luxembourg.
The hand-painted reproduction
The oil canvas is made solely to your order, onto gallery canvas, in the size you choose. The painter works from the original; because this is a small and quiet motif, larger formats reveal a structure in the grass that is barely visible in the source. 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 still life is Bouquet of Flowers. The same eventless city edge, stretched into a wide band, is Sawmill, Outskirts of Paris.
- Motif: a meadow with trees and a low horizon, with no figures
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted
- Sizes: from 50 x 40 cm to 130 x 110 cm
- Point of interest: the museum was renamed from Bridgestone to Artizon in 2020, so older sources give a different name
