Henri Rousseau – Portrait of a Woman in a Landscape

Portrait of a Woman in a Landscape, 1899

A woman seated in profile

The canvas is upright, a little taller than it is wide. The woman sits in profile facing
right, on a dark bentwood chair whose curved back shows behind her. She wears a long
rust-red dress with long sleeves; the skirt widens and falls in folds to the ground. Her
hair is pale and combed up into a knot on the crown. The face is pale and painted entirely
from the side; the look goes forward, not out at the viewer. In her lap she holds something
white – the shape could be a folded cloth, a fan or a sheet of paper. The museum record
does not say, so we do not decide it either.

A hedge of thin branches

Behind her and beside her a dense band of low growth runs the full width of the canvas:
thin, almost bare branches cross into a mesh, with green leaves and small white flowers
between them. That band sits exactly at the height of her body, so the figure is enclosed
by twigs to the waist. Rousseau does not use the plants as a backdrop; he sets them in the
same plane as the figure, and the same device appears in The Past and the Present.

A spire with a cross

Left of centre a tall dark church spire rises above the greenery, narrow and pointed,
with a cross at the top. Beside it stands a slender conical conifer of almost the same
height, so that the architecture and the tree read as a pair. Lower down, a band of red
roof tiles shows between the shrubs. The sky is a pale blue-grey and entirely empty –
no clouds and no birds – which leaves the spire as the only vertical in the upper half of
the picture.

Trees and grass

To the right of the woman grow dark conifers and a lighter tree with long branches
hanging down. In the foreground is a plane of grass with separate plants set out across it:
pale leafy tufts to the left and right, a cluster of red flowers low at the centre, and a
few small white flowers. The lower left corner carries the signature – with Rousseau that
is not the only place he signs, and elsewhere he puts it on the right.

The year 1899

The work was made in 1899. Rousseau had by then been six
years out of the Paris customs service and was painting professionally, taking portrait
commissions as well. His portraits are not studio pieces: he puts the figure outdoors,
among plants and in front of suburban buildings, and it is exactly this relation between
person and place that is their subject. A comparably conceived portrait of a child is
Boy on the Rocks, and among the group scenes there is The Wedding Party.

The museum and the record

The original is held by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia under accession number
BF260, under the title Portrait of a Woman in a Landscape, in French
Portrait de femme dans un paysage. The museum records it as oil on canvas
measuring 100.5 x 81.5 cm and gives the year as 1899. The museum does not name the sitter,
and neither do we. Another Paris subject in our series is Jardin du Luxembourg.

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. The hardest part of this subject is the hedge: it is a mesh of thin
branches that has to be painted stroke by stroke, because otherwise the band turns into one
flat green plane and the figure loses the frame she sits in. Because the work is done by
hand, every copy differs a little from the last. The canvas is stretched on a wooden frame
and delivered ready to hang. Other works by this painter are in the Henri Rousseau gallery.