Description
| Year of creation: | c. 1908 |
| Original size: | 37.6 cm x 46.2 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main |
The Avenue in the Park at Saint-Cloud, c. 1908
An avenue that runs to a single point
The canvas is upright and the subject is simple and strict: two rows of tall trees
converge from the left and the right towards the centre. The trunks are straight, dark and
evenly spaced, so that they form two ranks of verticals that grow denser with distance. The
crowns almost close overhead and leave only a wedge of bright blue sky. Below them a sandy
path of a pale pink colour runs from the bottom edge straight into the depth.
Tiny people
A few figures walk along the path, all of them very small beside the trees. Nearest is a
woman in a long coral-pink dress and a hat, beside her a woman dressed in dark, and further
up the path a man in dark and a group of others. It is exactly this mismatch between the
size of the people and the size of the trees that the museum’s own record singles out as a
property of this canvas: tiny people on an avenue of evenly ranked trees.
What closes the avenue
At the end of the path a pale architecture opens out: an upright light element in the
middle of a low balustrade, with reddish walls to either side. That pale plane is the
brightest point in the lower half of the picture and works as the goal the whole composition
leads to. The museum does not name the structure, so neither do we; it does record that the
park was laid out by André Le Nôtre.
Every detail treated alike
The museum’s record notes that in Rousseau every detail is treated as equal, whether it
lies in the foreground or the background. Here that shows in the leaves: individual leaves
are marked with small light strokes even in the most distant crowns, where the eye would in
fact merge them into one plane. The result is not a mistake of perspective but an even
density, which gives the canvas its calm, tapestry-like surface. A comparably ordered park
subject is Jardin du Luxembourg.
Around the year 1908
The museum dates the work to about 1908, that is to the last years of Rousseau’s life.
The same record states that the painter gave up his post as a customs official at the age of
41 to devote himself to painting alone, and that as a self-taught artist he developed a
style marked by distortions and inconsistent proportion. A suburban subject from the same
years is Outskirts of Paris, and a river bank is The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre.
The museum and the record
The original is held by the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main under inventory number
SG 404; it was acquired in 1926. The museum records it as oil on canvas measuring
46.2 x 37.6 cm and states that it is signed at the lower right “H. Rousseau”. The museum
gives the image rights as public domain. A portrait by the same painter set outdoors is
The Past and the Present.
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 spacing of the trunks: if the gaps
between them are not even, the avenue loses its depth and the path no longer runs to a single
point. So we begin with the trunks and only then lay on the leaves. 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.
