Henri Rousseau – The Past and the Present

The Past and the Present, 1899

A double portrait behind a screen of leaves

The canvas is narrow and tall. A man and a woman stand at the centre, both in black,
both turned straight at the viewer. He has dark hair and a heavy black moustache, a black
coat, a white shirt with a standing collar and a dark tie; in white gloves he holds a small
bluish posy. She wears her hair drawn smoothly back, white gathered lace at the throat, a
close dark bodice and a wide black skirt that fills the whole lower right of the picture.
Both figures are visible to about the hips; below that a screen of foliage covers them, so
that the two bodies do not stand on the ground but disappear into the greenery.

Two heads in the sky

Above, among white clouds, two heads float without bodies. The left is a man’s, with a
moustache and dark hair, set against a small cloud; the right is fairer and younger, held
in a larger white mass of cloud. They are not painted as a vision or as smoke – their
outlines are as firm as the faces below, they simply have no neck and no shoulders. The
Barnes Foundation’s own record reads them as a homage to the deceased spouses of the two
people standing. We do not adjudicate that reading; we point to what is actually on the
canvas: two faces held in the sky at exactly the focus of the pair beneath them.

The blossoming sapling in front

A slender sapling with a pale trunk rises in front of the couple, its branches spread
and scattered with pinkish-white blossom and small green leaves. Those branches reach
across the full width of the canvas and cover the black of the clothes. Because of this the
pair does not read as two figures in a meadow but as two faces looking out through
vegetation. The same device – a figure part-covered by leaves so that the face is pushed
forward – appears in Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Chestnut, grass and small flowers

A slim tree with palmate leaves grows at the left edge, its trunk running nearly the
full height and giving the composition a vertical support. Behind the two figures lies a
band of dark, almost black green, and above it a pale blue-green sky opens with white
cloud. The lower third is a plane of grass sown with small white and pale mauve flowers set
in little clumps. The lower right corner carries the signature.

1899 and the “portrait-landscape”

The work was made in 1899. Rousseau had by then been six years out of the Paris customs
service and was painting professionally. For pictures of this kind – a portrait set
outdoors, among plants instead of against a studio backdrop – he coined the term
“portrait-landscape”, a fact the museum record also carries. That idea explains why the
plants here are not ornament: they carry as much weight as the two faces. A comparably
placed single figure is Child with Puppet (To Celebrate the Baby), and among the group scenes there is The Wedding Party.

The museum and the record

The original is held by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia under accession number
BF582, under the full title The Past and the Present, or Philosophical Thought,
in French Le passé et le présent, ou Pensée philosophique. The museum records it
as oil on canvas measuring 85.2 x 46.8 cm and gives the year as 1899. The Barnes holds
several Rousseau canvases, so this one can be seen there in the company of others. Another
Paris subject on our shelf is Jardin du Luxembourg.

How we make this narrow canvas

We make the picture as a hand-painted oil on canvas reproduction, to order and in the
size you choose. In a format this narrow and this tall the ratio of the sides matters more
than it does in squarer subjects, so the sizes offered follow the ratio of the original and
do not squeeze the pair at the centre. 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. The full range is in the Henri Rousseau gallery.