A new exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, titled Henri Rousseau: The Ambition of Painting, showcases around 50 works by the French artist Henri Rousseau (1844-1910). Known as “Le Douanier” or “the customs officer” due to his job collecting taxes, Rousseau was often dismissed during his lifetime. His early artistic efforts were seen as naive, as he was self-taught and lacked formal training.
Claire Bernardi, director of the Musée de l’Orangerie, highlights the significance of the exhibition: “We’ve been very lucky, we’ve had an incredible opportunity. By working with two major institutions, one American and one French, we were able to pool our strengths, and as a result of this international cooperation, we’ve had some fabulous loans.”
Juliette Degennes, co-curator of the exhibition, adds: “The first critics to see his works at the Salon des Indépendants referred to his naivety. He was mainly a self-taught painter, but he did benefit from an education, even if he didn’t follow an art course.”
Wild Inspiration
Rousseau began painting shortly before his 50th birthday after leaving his job at the Paris Customs office. His inspiration came from albums of illustrations featuring wild animals and visits to the ‘Jardin des plantes’. To stand out among other artists, Rousseau “diversified genres and techniques to carve out a place for himself on the Parisian art scene,” according to Bernardi.
His style is particularly evident in his scenes of lush jungles filled with wild animals, such as the painting The lion, hungry, pounces on the antelope. The poet Apollinaire once described him as “the most exotic of exotic painters.”
Bernardi explains: “It’s a work that speaks to children because it’s so direct. I think that today, more than ever, we will see in these works their strength and their modernity. It comes out of the dream, but it also comes out of something that touches us, I was going to say, quite directly in our dreams, but also our anxieties.”
Masterpieces on Loan
The exhibition includes the painting The Sleeping Gypsy, on loan from New York’s Museum of Modern Art (Moma), one of Rousseau’s masterpieces and one of his most mysterious canvases.
Recognition in the United States
Albert C. Barnes, a passionate collector, was one of the first to show interest in Rousseau’s work: “His paintings have the charm of a child’s fairy tale, but there is nothing childish or uneducated about the skill with which they are executed.”
According to Degennes, Rousseau quickly gained attention in the United States. “There are some very fine loans from American institutions, because Rousseau was very quickly noticed in the United States. First of all his painter friend Max Weber, who, when he returned to the United States in the 1910s, organised an exhibition at Galerie 291.”
“American collectors were also quick to take an interest in his work. ‘La Bohémienne endormie’, for example, was acquired by MoMA in 1939. It was very early on and a major monographic exhibition was devoted to it in 1942. So there really was early attention paid to Rousseau on the American side,” concludes Degennes.
