Henri Rousseau
Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) was a largely self-taught French painter whose work developed outside conventional academic training. Born in Laval, he held a customs-related post in Paris, which gave rise to his familiar nickname Le Douanier. He pursued painting alongside that employment and retired in 1893. Although his work met ridicule from some contemporaries, artists and writers of the avant-garde recognised the originality of his approach.
Rousseau is best known for jungle scenes assembled from imagination, botanical gardens, illustrated publications and other sources. He did not travel to the tropical places he depicted. His landscapes, portraits and scenes of Paris are equally revealing of his methods. Firm contours, carefully separated shapes and unexpected relationships of scale give the pictures a distinctive order. Their stillness can be reassuring in one passage and strangely unsettling in another.
Calling this art naïve risks making its deliberate pictorial choices sound merely accidental. Rousseau’s images do not depend on the naturalistic handling favoured by many painters around him; they construct a coherent world through a different visual logic. Outskirts of Paris, represented here, offers a quieter subject than the famous jungles, but the same independence of vision is present. Buildings, vegetation and open space can be considered as individual forms and as parts of an overall design. The result encourages us to examine how a seemingly familiar place becomes unfamiliar through the act of painting.
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