Henri Rousseau – Rendezvous in the Forest

Rendezvous in the Forest, 1889

A European wood, not a jungle

This is not one of Rousseau’s tropical pictures. What we see is a European wood in late
autumn: thin branches spread in a dense net against a pale grey-blue sky, a large cream cloud
stands at the upper right, and olive-brown undergrowth fills the lower two thirds of the canvas.
The scale of colour is almost monochrome, made of greys, olives and browns, without strong
contrasts.

The couple at the centre

Just below centre, among the trees, stands a couple in eighteenth-century costume: a man in a
tricorn hat and a woman in a pale dress, turned towards one another. The head of a white horse
shows to their left. The figures are small and caught in the web of branches, so the viewer only
finds them after a moment; the scene is intimate but painted without sentimentality. Rousseau
signed the lower right corner.

The year 1889

The canvas dates from 1889, the year of the Paris World’s Fair, and is considerably earlier
than the great jungles. In this period Rousseau painted mainly the outskirts of Paris, city views
and woodland scenes; the beasts and tropical growth came later. A comparable early work is
The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre.

The net of branches as structure

The most striking thing here is the handling of the branches. Rousseau does not suggest them;
he draws each one, leaf by leaf, until a dense lace covers the whole surface. The same precision
reappears later in the foliage of his jungles, except that there it reads as luxuriance and here
as dry and wintry. Equally precise growth appears in The Waterfall.

Collection and museum

The painting is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which received it as a gift
of the W. Averell Harriman Foundation. The accession number is 1972.9.20 and it measures 73.0 x
92.0 cm. American collections discovered Rousseau early, which is why so many of his central
works are now outside France. Another picture of the city’s edge is Jardin du Luxembourg.

The customs officer who was not one

In 1889 Rousseau was still employed at the Paris toll office and painted on his days off; he
left the post only in 1893, at forty-nine. The nickname Le Douanier, the customs
officer, is therefore inaccurate, and in 1910 he corrected it himself in an interview for the
newspaper Comoedia: he had worked for the municipal toll service, not for customs. The nickname
was given to him by the writer Alfred Jarry, and it stuck.

Our reproduction

We make this as a hand-painted reproduction in oil on canvas, to order, in the size you
choose. Because it is hand-painted, every copy differs slightly from the last; it is not a print.
The canvas is stretched on a wooden frame and arrives ready to hang. For a comparison with his
tropical scenes see Scouts Attacked by a Tiger. Other works by this painter are in the Henri Rousseau gallery.