Description
| Year of creation: | 1905 |
| Original size: | 114.0 cm x 163.0 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris |
The Wedding Party, 1905
A group portrait in a wood
The wedding party is set against a band of trees: a chestnut with dense green leaves at the
left, and thin, almost white trunks rising at the right and behind. A band of blue sky opens
between the crowns at the top. The ground is grass and is empty, without a path or a building;
the scene is lifted out of any particular place. Rousseau signed the lower right corner with
his full name.
The bride at the centre
The centre is taken by the bride in a long white dress and veil, turned straight at the
viewer; she holds a posy and a white handkerchief, and her train spreads to the right. Six
members of the party stand around her in black: moustached men in jackets with white collars,
women in dark dresses, and at the right an older woman seated in a white cap and a brown
shawl. At the lower left an older man in a blue working smock sits on a tree stump, a stick in
his hand.
A bride with no feet
The most remarked detail of this canvas is that the bride cannot be seen to stand: the dress
meets the grass and there are no feet. The effect is that she floats among her family.
Scholarship does not agree on the reason – some read it as Rousseau’s awkwardness, others as a
deliberate device that lifts the bride out of the group. We do not adjudicate that; we point
only at what is visible in the picture.
The black dog in front
Below the bride a large black poodle sits facing the viewer and closes the composition along
the bottom edge. The dog is painted with the same frontal calm as Rousseau’s wild animals: it
does not look at the wedding party but at us. The same treatment of an animal appears in
The Rabbit’s Meal.
The year 1905
The canvas dates from 1905. By then Rousseau had lived from painting and teaching for twelve
years, having left his post at the Paris toll office in 1893. Group portraits were also a source
of commissions for him: neighbours and acquaintances sat for their likeness, which brought in
income between the larger canvases. A comparable figure painting is Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Museum and record
The painting is held by the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris under inventory number RF 1960 25,
under its original French title La Noce. The museum records it as oil on canvas
measuring H. 163 ; L. 114 cm. The Orangerie holds a group of Rousseau’s works from the Jean
Walter and Paul Guillaume collection, so this canvas can be seen in Paris alongside others.
Another woodland subject on our shelf is Rendezvous in the Forest, and a related figure piece is The Sleeping Gypsy.
Our reproduction
We make this as a hand-painted reproduction in oil on canvas, to order, in the size you
choose. Because it is hand-painted, every copy differs slightly from the last; it is not a
print. The canvas is stretched on a wooden frame and arrives ready to hang. Other works by this painter are in the Henri Rousseau gallery.
