Description
| Year: | 1905 |
| Original size: | 21.8 cm x 16 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (primitivism), post-impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | National Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires, Argentina |
Portrait of the Father of the Artist is a work by the painter Henri Rousseau, oil on canvas, painted in 1905. The original measures 21.8 cm x 16 cm and is in the collection of National Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires, Argentina (inv. 8555). The picture shows: the head and shoulders of an elderly man in profile rise out of a bank of white cloud under a blue sky.
Portrait of the Father of the Artist – a hand-painted reproduction
The upper third is a bright blue sky. Below it a great bank of white and grey cloud billows
across the picture and fills the lower two thirds. Out of that cloud rise the head and
shoulders of an elderly man in strict profile, facing left. He has a high bald crown, dark
grey hair brushed out at the sides and back over the ear, heavy brows, a strong straight nose,
ruddy cheeks, a closed mouth and a full jaw. He wears a white shirt collar and a black coat
with a dark standing collar. The cloud cuts off the bust, so the figure appears to rest in it
rather than to stand behind it. There is nothing else in the picture – no ground, no room, no
object. At the lower left, on the grey cloud, is the dark signature Henri Rousseau.
A portrait without a room
The painter puts nothing around the face: no table, no wall, no chair. Only sky and cloud
remain, so the eye has nowhere to go but the profile. It is that emptiness that gives a very
small canvas an unusual weight. What the cloud means we do not explain – we describe what is
painted and no more. There are three further portraits in this group, all of them with a
setting: Portrait of a Woman, Portrait of Madame M. and Woman with Basket of Eggs.
What the record says, and what it does not
The museum record’s title says the work shows the artist’s father, and it attributes the
work to this painter. We repeat that and stop there. We give no name, no birth or death date,
and we do not claim that the portrait was painted from life, from a photograph, or after the
sitter’s death – the record supports none of it, and a cloud is not evidence. Nor do we infer
an occupation or a station from the black coat.
What it means on the wall
The original measures 21.8 cm x 16 cm and is by far the smallest canvas in this group –
smaller than a sheet of A5. That is exactly why the choice of size changes more here than
anywhere else: what is an intimate little image in the original becomes, at half a metre wide,
a full portrait with a life-size head. Both are legitimate, but they are not the same thing.
We do not reproduce canvases at the original measurement; you choose the size for your wall.
For the opposite case, where the sky carries a whole scene, see View of the Bridge at Sèvres.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every canvas is painted by hand in oils, to order, in the size you choose. The painter
works from a high-resolution photograph of the original, layer by layer, so that the separate
strands of hair, the white collar and the soft edges of the cloud stay legible at smaller
sizes too. Because this is hand work, two canvases of the same size always differ slightly;
that is not a fault but the difference between a painting and a print. Prices on this page
start at 155 EUR for the smallest size.
