Painting in the first half of our century has largely been derived from two opposing views of aesthetics and the creative process. The artist in the first tradition is no longer concerned to reproduce the natural world but instead feels the need to distort it, break it down into parts and rebuild it according to some new guiding prin-ciple ; this is a move in the direction of non-representational art. The artist in the second tradition, however, continues to believe that the visible world is the model which should inspire art, and indeed dictate to it ; logically, therefore, the most poetic expression of this relationship is to be found in the " dialogue " of an impres-sionable mind with the manifestations of nature. The art of Henri Rousseau belongs to the second category. It is, so to speak, art in its pure state, unrefined and in some way touched with grace. No doubt the artist who has a shaping intelligence, and yet retains his childish insights, is the more complete painter ; but such innocence is rare, and it is still more rare for it to survive. In Rousseau it did survive. He drew inspiration from the poetic heritage of children's rhymes. Poor as he was, he kept his childish wonder at the worlds of reality and imagination, fused into one vision that both comforted and appalled him but
which was suffused with his love of all living things. He retained in him some residue of the spell-binding power of the spirit that moves over the face of the waters in the opening pages of the Book of Genesis.
Henri-Julien-Felix Rousseau was born in the Place Hardy. Laval, on 20 May 1844 - not 21 May which is the date of the birth certificate. His father was a tinsmith and his mother the daughter of an officer. Rousseau himself joined the army when he was eighteen and was assigned to the band of the 52nd Infantry, playing the saxophone. It is possible that he took part in the Mexican campaign, but Rousseau's daughter, Madame Julia Bernard, cannot be certain. Therefore we do not know if his visions of the virgin forest are memories or purely imaginary. In 1869 Henri Rousseau married a penniless girl called Clemente Boitard, the daughter of a furniture-seller from Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He found a job as a bailiff's clerk but was too tender-hearted to spend his time listing the pos-sessions of poor people who had been declared bankrupt. Through a relative of his wife who was an inspector in the Paris, municipal customs service he obtained a post as a customs officer—hence his popular name " Le Douanier ". He worked first at the Pont de la Tournelle, later at a check-point on the town walls and at the Porte de Meudon. He is described in Gil Bias as " keeping watch on the barges moored by the Quai du Louvre ", which would tend to be confirmed by two of the Douanier's drawings (in the Max Weber Collection, New York) ; one is of the Quai d'Auteuil, the other of the " patache d'aval ", the small riverside customs house on the same quay. From these various
observation points. Rousseau conceived his portraits " of the town and its suburbs. Clemence Rousseau died at the age of thirty-nine, enabling the Douanier, himself about fifty, to retire with a pension from the relative security of the customs service. At once he threw himself into an orgy of painting. His daughter Julia, the last surviving member of a family of nine chil-dren, was sent to Angers to be brought up by an uncle. According to Rousseau's own account, he began to paint in 1884—In the catalogues we have outtcnitto reference to the two pain-tings he claims to have " submitted " in the follo-wing year to the Salon des Champs-Elysées : an Italian Dance and a Sunset. Perhaps they were indeed submitted, but not accepted. The Douanier was sponsored at the Salon des Ind& pendants by Signac and Luce and exhibited there regularly until the end of his life. In the spring of 1891 he showed his first composition with an exotic theme, Surprised !" M. Rousseau becomes more and more astounding each year, " wrote Felix Vallotton in the Gazette de Lausanne. " People bristle at his submissions, laughs ring out. He outdoes them all. His tiger surprising its prey is to be seen ; it is the alpha and omega of painting. " Later Rousseau was also to exhibit at the Salon d'Automne. Together with Vallotton (whom he called Valton) he visited Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Pissarro and Seurat. He was acquainted with Gustave Coquiot, the art critic, and Alfred Jarry, a fellow citizen of Laval who was known at that time as the author of Les Minutes de Sable Memorial. Through Jarry he met Remy de Gourmont who, in 1895, published in his review L'Ymagier the lithograph War. based on the picture exhibited in the previous year.
Before he managed to scrape a living as an artist, the Douanier gave lessons in Before he managed to scrape a livinpgainatsinagn drawing, elocution, singing, violin and clarinet: He described himself as a teacher of adult educa-tion classes at the Philotechnic Association of the Town of Paris. Salmon tells us he also super-vised the sale of Le Petit Parisien, and was therefore obliged to rise early. Life cannot have been easy. He tried to persuade the municipal authorities of Laval to purchase The Sleeping Gypsy (not the version now in New York, which, Robert Delaunay assured me, is not the original). His offer was refused. Early in January 1899 he completed a five-act play The Revenge of a Russian Orphan, which he offered, without success, to Monsieur Rochard, director of the Chatelet Theatre. On 2 September of the same year he married for the second time. His new wife was a widow, Rosalie-Josephine Tensorer nee Noury ; she was to die four years later. Rousseau had been living at 3 Rue Vercin-getorix but moved to 36 Rue Gassendi. He exhi-bited fairly regularly at the Salon des Indepen-dants, usually views of the Marne and of the bridges of Paris, together with the occasional family group or jungle scene. At the Salon d'Automne of 1905 his Hungry Lion Attacking the Antelope was displayed in the room devoted to the Fauves. In December 1907 he was committed to the Sante Prison because of his involvement in a serious affair of a fraudulent cheque. He was provisionally released by the new year and given a suspended sentence of two years. A police report of the time describes him as " pale-complexioned with a few freckles, eyes rather deep set ". He " peered ahead " as he walked and looked like " a sickly man ". At this time Rousseau lived at number 2b in the Rue Perrel. His paintings of that period
include the group portrait of the small shop-keepers of the Plaisance area. In 1908 some of Rousseau's friends organised a banquet in his honour in the tumbledown tenement known as the Bateau-Lavoir at 13 Rue Ravignan. The venue for the dinner was Picasso's barn-like studio. The guests included collectors, painters such as Marie Laurencin and Georges Braque, as well as Picasso himself, the writers and poets Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Andre Salmon and Maurice Raynal. This was the famous occasion when Rousseau arrived clutching a child's violin on which he proceeded to play a waltz of his own composition called Clemence ;
Apollinaire is said to have made up a poem in his honour on the edge of the table ; there was dancing to the strains of an accordion and an atmosphere of general intoxication from the outset. It was in August of the same year that Rousseau went to the Luxembourg Gardens to sketch the background " for a portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire, The Muse Inspiring the Poet (the version " with wallflowers " that is now in the Museum 'of Modern Western Art, Moscow) ; this was completed in the spring of 1909 when Marie Laurencin agreed to model as the Muse. Apollinaire has left an account of his experiences. " I posed on a number of occa-sions for the Rau ierin_t_isseau, and before he started he measured my nose, my mouth, my ears, my forehead, my hands and my whole body, and then transferred these measurements quite faithfully onto his canvas, reducing them to the scale of the frame. As he did this Rousseau entertained me, for sitting is extremely boring, by singing songs from his youth. " In May the painter worked on his second Apollinaire portrait (the picture " with sweet williams " in the Kunst-museum. Basle) and completed it in September. At this time the Douanier appears to have enjoyed a degree of success. William Uhdc, Ambroise Vollard and Brummer were his first customers. Baroness Oettinger (Roche Grey), Ardengo Soffici the painter and aesthetician, the sculptor Hoetzer, Jastrebsoff (better known as Serge Fere° and Robert Delaunay were soon added to their number. Rousseau had long cherished dreams of mar-rying a widow called Eugenie-Leonie V., on whom he lavished attentions, even waiting for her every evening outside L'Economie Monagere where she worked as a saleswoman. He went as far as to offer her financial assistance, but she refused his suggestion. Spurned, the painter sank deeper and deeper into dejection. He caught cold from cooling his heels " in the rain lying in wait for the " sinister Leonie ", was taken to the Necker Hospital and died there, alone and wret-ched, on 2 September 1910.
Rousseau had little in the way of education or experience of the world, although he wrote grammatically and without spelling mistakes. His interest in life did not extend beyond observing the things about him in all their freshness. At heart he always remained the customs officer who paced to and fro in front of the toll-house which was his domain. It was little enough in itself, but within these narrow confines the sight of a wall was the whole world for this visionary, whose sense of poetry could cast a spell over the most banal everyday reality. In Plaisance the concierges used to see him pass by wearing his floppy artist's beret and always clutching some-thing under his arm, portfolio, violin case, or paint box. In these humble surroundings he appeared almost l
Painting in the first half of our century has largely been derived from two opposing views of aesthetics and the creative process. The artist in the first tradition is no longer concerned to reproduce the natural world but instead feels the need to distort it, break it down into parts and rebuild it according to some new guiding prin-ciple ; this is a move in the direction of non-representational art. The artist in the second tradition, however, continues to believe that the visible world is the model which should inspire art, and indeed dictate to it ; logically, therefore, the most poetic expression of this relationship is to be found in the " dialogue " of an impres-sionable mind with the manifestations of nature. The art of Henri Rousseau belongs to the second category. It is, so to speak, art in its pure state, unrefined and in some way touched with grace. No doubt the artist who has a shaping intelligence, and yet retains his childish insights, is the more complete painter ; but such innocence is rare, and it is still more rare for it to survive. In Rousseau it did survive. He drew inspiration from the poetic heritage of children's rhymes. Poor as he was, he kept his childish wonder at the worlds of reality and imagination, fused into one vision that both comforted and appalled him but
which was suffused with his love of all living things. He retained in him some residue of the spell-binding power of the spirit that moves over the face of the waters in the opening pages of the Book of Genesis.
Henri-Julien-Felix Rousseau was born in the Place Hardy. Laval, on 20 May 1844 - not 21 May which is the date of the birth certificate. His father was a tinsmith and his mother the daughter of an officer. Rousseau himself joined the army when he was eighteen and was assigned to the band of the 52nd Infantry, playing the saxophone. It is possible that he took part in the Mexican campaign, but Rousseau's daughter, Madame Julia Bernard, cannot be certain. Therefore we do not know if his visions of the virgin forest are memories or purely imaginary. In 1869 Henri Rousseau married a penniless girl called Clemente Boitard, the daughter of a furniture-seller from Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He found a job as a bailiff's clerk but was too tender-hearted to spend his time listing the pos-sessions of poor people who had been declared bankrupt. Through a relative of his wife who was an inspector in the Paris, municipal customs service he obtained a post as a customs officer—hence his popular name " Le Douanier ". He worked first at the Pont de la Tournelle, later at a check-point on the town walls and at the Porte de Meudon. He is described in Gil Bias as " keeping watch on the barges moored by the Quai du Louvre ", which would tend to be confirmed by two of the Douanier's drawings (in the Max Weber Collection, New York) ; one is of the Quai d'Auteuil, the other of the " patache d'aval ", the small riverside customs house on the same quay. From these various
observation points. Rousseau conceived his portraits " of the town and its suburbs. Clemence Rousseau died at the age of thirty-nine, enabling the Douanier, himself about fifty, to retire with a pension from the relative security of the customs service. At once he threw himself into an orgy of painting. His daughter Julia, the last surviving member of a family of nine chil-dren, was sent to Angers to be brought up by an uncle. According to Rousseau's own account, he began to paint in 1884—In the catalogues we have outtcnitto reference to the two pain-tings he claims to have " submitted " in the follo-wing year to the Salon des Champs-Elysées : an Italian Dance and a Sunset. Perhaps they were indeed submitted, but not accepted. The Douanier was sponsored at the Salon des Ind& pendants by Signac and Luce and exhibited there regularly until the end of his life. In the spring of 1891 he showed his first composition with an exotic theme, Surprised !" M. Rousseau becomes more and more astounding each year, " wrote Felix Vallotton in the Gazette de Lausanne. " People bristle at his submissions, laughs ring out. He outdoes them all. His tiger surprising its prey is to be seen ; it is the alpha and omega of painting. " Later Rousseau was also to exhibit at the Salon d'Automne. Together with Vallotton (whom he called Valton) he visited Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Pissarro and Seurat. He was acquainted with Gustave Coquiot, the art critic, and Alfred Jarry, a fellow citizen of Laval who was known at that time as the author of Les Minutes de Sable Memorial. Through Jarry he met Remy de Gourmont who, in 1895, published in his review L'Ymagier the lithograph War. based on the picture exhibited in the previous year.
Before he managed to scrape a living as an artist, the Douanier gave lessons in Before he managed to scrape a livinpgainatsinagn drawing, elocution, singing, violin and clarinet: He described himself as a teacher of adult educa-tion classes at the Philotechnic Association of the Town of Paris. Salmon tells us he also super-vised the sale of Le Petit Parisien, and was therefore obliged to rise early. Life cannot have been easy. He tried to persuade the municipal authorities of Laval to purchase The Sleeping Gypsy (not the version now in New York, which, Robert Delaunay assured me, is not the original). His offer was refused. Early in January 1899 he completed a five-act play The Revenge of a Russian Orphan, which he offered, without success, to Monsieur Rochard, director of the Chatelet Theatre. On 2 September of the same year he married for the second time. His new wife was a widow, Rosalie-Josephine Tensorer nee Noury ; she was to die four years later. Rousseau had been living at 3 Rue Vercin-getorix but moved to 36 Rue Gassendi. He exhi-bited fairly regularly at the Salon des Indepen-dants, usually views of the Marne and of the bridges of Paris, together with the occasional family group or jungle scene. At the Salon d'Automne of 1905 his Hungry Lion Attacking the Antelope was displayed in the room devoted to the Fauves. In December 1907 he was committed to the Sante Prison because of his involvement in a serious affair of a fraudulent cheque. He was provisionally released by the new year and given a suspended sentence of two years. A police report of the time describes him as " pale-complexioned with a few freckles, eyes rather deep set ". He " peered ahead " as he walked and looked like " a sickly man ". At this time Rousseau lived at number 2b in the Rue Perrel. His paintings of that period
include the group portrait of the small shop-keepers of the Plaisance area. In 1908 some of Rousseau's friends organised a banquet in his honour in the tumbledown tenement known as the Bateau-Lavoir at 13 Rue Ravignan. The venue for the dinner was Picasso's barn-like studio. The guests included collectors, painters such as Marie Laurencin and Georges Braque, as well as Picasso himself, the writers and poets Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Andre Salmon and Maurice Raynal. This was the famous occasion when Rousseau arrived clutching a child's violin on which he proceeded to play a waltz of his own composition called Clemence ;
Apollinaire is said to have made up a poem in his honour on the edge of the table ; there was dancing to the strains of an accordion and an atmosphere of general intoxication from the outset. It was in August of the same year that Rousseau went to the Luxembourg Gardens to sketch the background " for a portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire, The Muse Inspiring the Poet (the version " with wallflowers " that is now in the Museum 'of Modern Western Art, Moscow) ; this was completed in the spring of 1909 when Marie Laurencin agreed to model as the Muse. Apollinaire has left an account of his experiences. " I posed on a number of occa-sions for the Rau ierin_t_isseau, and before he started he measured my nose, my mouth, my ears, my forehead, my hands and my whole body, and then transferred these measurements quite faithfully onto his canvas, reducing them to the scale of the frame. As he did this Rousseau entertained me, for sitting is extremely boring, by singing songs from his youth. " In May the painter worked on his second Apollinaire portrait (the picture " with sweet williams " in the Kunst-museum. Basle) and completed it in September. At this time the Douanier appears to have enjoyed a degree of success. William Uhdc, Ambroise Vollard and Brummer were his first customers. Baroness Oettinger (Roche Grey), Ardengo Soffici the painter and aesthetician, the sculptor Hoetzer, Jastrebsoff (better known as Serge Fere° and Robert Delaunay were soon added to their number. Rousseau had long cherished dreams of mar-rying a widow called Eugenie-Leonie V., on whom he lavished attentions, even waiting for her every evening outside L'Economie Monagere where she worked as a saleswoman. He went as far as to offer her financial assistance, but she refused his suggestion. Spurned, the painter sank deeper and deeper into dejection. He caught cold from cooling his heels " in the rain lying in wait for the " sinister Leonie ", was taken to the Necker Hospital and died there, alone and wret-ched, on 2 September 1910.
Rousseau had little in the way of education or experience of the world, although he wrote grammatically and without spelling mistakes. His interest in life did not extend beyond observing the things about him in all their freshness. At heart he always remained the customs officer who paced to and fro in front of the toll-house which was his domain. It was little enough in itself, but within these narrow confines the sight of a wall was the whole world for this visionary, whose sense of poetry could cast a spell over the most banal everyday reality. In Plaisance the concierges used to see him pass by wearing his floppy artist's beret and always clutching some-thing under his arm, portfolio, violin case, or paint box. In these humble surroundings he appeared almost l
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