Description
| Year of creation: | 1908 |
| Original size: | 80.3 cm x 100.3 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Guggenheim Museum, New York |
The Football Players, 1908
The Football Players is one of the few Rousseau works with a sporting subject and one of the strangest figure compositions in his output. The 1908 canvas belongs to the Guggenheim Museum in New York and measures 80.3 x 100.3 cm.
Four men in striped kit
Four moustached men in striped kit chase a ball on a clearing between autumn avenues of trees. The movements are stiff and symmetrical, as though caught mid-stride and then frozen; legs are often in the air while the bodies keep a perfect balance no real game allows. Which sport is actually shown is not agreed between sources: the title says football, while the kit and the way the ball is held suggest rugby, so we give both here. The trees behind are spaced in an even rhythm and the foliage is painted in red and yellow dots, one beside another. A comparably still figure arrangement is A Carnival Evening.
Why the scene reads as a stage
Rousseau set the figures on a shallow grass plane that rises like a theatre stage, with the avenues on either side working as wings. There is no shadow under the feet, no mud and no spectators. It is that absence of surroundings which turns a sporting picture into a ritual arrangement. Rousseau had retired by then and was painting full time; this is one of his last major works before The Dream. The same sense of an arrested moment is in Child with Puppet (To Celebrate the Baby). The same posed group in uniform appears again in Artillerymen.
The hand-painted reproduction
An order means a new canvas, painted for you, to order, in the size you choose. The painter works from the original; because the composition is strictly symmetrical the proportions are held at every format, so the central axis stays where it belongs. The canvas arrives stretched on a wooden stretcher frame and ready to hang, without an added frame. The full range is in the Henri Rousseau gallery, and a related figure work is Jardin du Luxembourg.
- Motif: four players in striped kit on a clearing between autumn trees
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted
- Sizes: from 50 x 60 cm to 150 x 190 cm
- Point of interest: sources disagree whether this is football or rugby; the kit suggests one, the title the other
