Henri Rousseau – The Banks of the Oise

The Banks of the Oise – a hand-painted reproduction

A bright green meadow runs across the whole foreground, and three cattle graze on it: a
tan-and-white spotted animal at the left with long pale horns and its head down, and two
near-black ones to the right of centre, also feeding, their horns and muzzles pale. A small
figure in blue with a white cap stands between them. Behind, at the left, rises a file of
tall narrow dark poplars; at the right stands one very large tree with a round crown of
feathery blue-green foliage on a dark trunk. Between them is a mass of mixed trees, some in
rust and orange. A pale horizontal band runs behind the meadow at the left. The upper third
is flat grey-blue sky. In the photograph the bare brown edge of the canvas shows along the
top and the left.

Three animals that do not look back

What is interesting here is that not one of the animals looks towards us – all three have
their heads at the grass. The scene is therefore not a meeting but an observation: we are
watching something that pays us no attention. It is the opposite of the device the same
painter uses elsewhere, where the animals stare straight out. On a wall that means the canvas
does not demand attention and sits well in a room that already has plenty going on – a living
room, a dining room, beside a full bookshelf. The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre takes a similar approach, and also
names water in its title that you cannot actually see in the scene.

Two grazing pictures, two different spaces

This canvas reads best beside Scene in Bagneux on the Outskirts of Paris, painted two years later and showing much the
same thing: cattle, a meadow, trees behind. The difference is depth. There the trees close
the scene off and it stays shallow; here the poplars and the great crown open the space into
several planes, all the way to the sky. If you want to see how the same painter handles a
flat, empty surface, look also at Meadowland, where a meadow carries almost the whole canvas
unaided.

A small original with a long horizon

The original measures 33 cm x 46 cm. That is a small canvas holding a very wide scene –
three animals, a file of poplars and an enormous crown in under half a metre. It is exactly
why it works in the wider sizes: the motif is horizontal by nature and stretches well over a
sofa, a sideboard or a bed. We do not copy canvases at their original size; you choose the
size for your wall. To see how the same painter handles water that is actually visible, look
at The Canal.

How a hand-painted reproduction is made

Every canvas is hand-painted in oil, to order, in the size you choose. The painter works
from a high-resolution photograph of the original, layer by layer, so that the markings on
the spotted animal, the feathery foliage of the great crown and the rust accents behind stay
readable even at smaller sizes. Because this is handwork, two canvases of the same size are
always slightly different; that is not a fault but the difference between a painting and a
print. Prices start at 124 EUR for the smallest sizes on this page.