Description
| Year of creation: | ca. 1908–09 |
| Original size: | 45.7 cm x 54.6 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The Metropolitan Museum, New York |
The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre, ca. 1908–09
The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre is one of the few Rousseau paintings with no jungle, no beast and nothing exotic in it: an ordinary stretch of the Paris outskirts with a river, trees and a few roofs. The canvas is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
A place that no longer exists
The Bièvre was a small river on the southern edge of Paris, lined with tanneries and the working settlements of Bicêtre. It was progressively culverted as the city grew and now runs underground in the sewer system, so the view shown here can no longer be found. Rousseau painted a landscape that disappeared shortly after him. This was the edge Rousseau knew better than anyone: as an employee of the Paris toll service he spent years at the gates where the city ran out into fields, depots and workers’ housing. The nickname Le Douanier, the customs officer, comes from that post. His jungles borrowed from the hothouse and the postcard; this subject he had in front of him. Anyone drawn to his quiet, non-jungle subjects will find a related scene in Jardin du Luxembourg.
Why the date is not a single year
The dating of this work comes from the painter himself. A note in Rousseau’s own hand, dated 1909, is affixed to the stretcher, in which he identified the subject; that year he consigned the picture for sale to the dealer Ambroise Vollard. The museum therefore dates it to about 1908–09 rather than to one year. This side of Rousseau’s work is far less known than the jungles, although it is in canvases like this that his construction of depth is clearest: band by band, from the lower edge towards the horizon, with no aerial perspective. The same procedure is visible in Meadowland.
The hand-painted reproduction
We make the painting to order, in oil, to order, in the size you choose. The painter works from the original; colour values and brushwork therefore differ from an impression, because the reproduction is a new painting and not a print. The canvas arrives stretched on a wooden stretcher frame and ready to hang. The full range by this painter is in the Henri Rousseau gallery, and a related still-life subject is Bouquet of Flowers. Another working river on the edge of Paris, with a vessel moored at the bank, is The Great Laundry Boat at Charenton Bridge.
- Motif: a riverbank on the southern edge of Paris, with trees and houses
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted to order
- Sizes: from 46 x 55 cm to 150 x 180 cm
- Point of interest: the Bièvre no longer runs here; since the early twentieth century it flows beneath Paris
