A couple dressed in white carnival attire venture out into a wintry forest. They have an uncertain look on their faces. Actually, it’s uncertain if they have faces. Like rejects from Walt Disney’s Fantasia, they amble about as if looking for the exit. The trees are passable, if a bit basic, but the people don’t really fit into the scene at all — it’s as if they’ve been pasted onto the backdrop with glue.
Carnival Evening is a painting that stunned visitors when it appeared at a Paris art gallery in 1886. The new Salon des Indepéndants was set up on the Place du Carousel with the aim of taking on the stuffy French art establishment. In the original Paris Salon des Artistes Francais, new works were vetted through review panels, but in this new gallery anybody could exhibit their art as long as they paid the fee of fifteen francs. The biggest success of the exhibition was a work by Georges Seurat, one of the founders of the event. His Sunday Afternoon on the Ile La Grand Jatte is now iconic — we know him for his ‘Pointillist’ style of tiny dots. But the creator of Carnival Evening caused a sensation for quite different reasons.
Henri Rousseau did not have the profile of an accomplished painter. A poor tax collector, he claimed to not take up painting until his early forties, retiring in 1893 on a measly pension in order to do it full time. He had scarcely been painting for two years when, encouraged by the younger painter Maximilien Luce, he submitted four works to the Salon des Indepéndants. Despite continual mockery, he would continue to submit to the show almost every year until his death.
Today Rousseau’s paintings are covetously held in some of the most famous museum collections in the world. Characteristics that make his style so distinct — the dreamlike atmosphere, flat perspective, and oddly rendered figures — are all present in Carnival Evening. But it was an inauspicious start for the painter who would humourously become known as Le Douanier — the customs inspector. Actually, it’s a wonder he got anywhere.
Impersonating nature
Growing up in the town of Laval, and then Angers, Rousseau remained attracted to quiet, natural locales throughout his life. His paintings often centre around nature, animals, and rustic settings but although unthreatening, there is always something disarming about them.
For one, his figures tend to have an ambigious relationship to the scenery. Take his portrait, Boy on the Rocks. It is unclear whether said boy is standing on, sitting on, or floating above said rocks. Nor does the blank expression of the child indicate how he feels about this situation. The press mockingly renamed the work as ‘Dwarf with the Enormous Head’, drawing attention to another idiosyncrasy of Rousseau’s — his tendency to produce people with disproportionate features.
Arguably, this wasn’t accidental. Even as his ambition as a painter grew throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, these comical, childish depictions remained. His unconventional methods may explain why. If he was using models, he would literally take measurements of their faces so that he could transcribe them ‘reduced in size but proportionately exact’ onto the canvas. He would hold his painter’s palette to the model’s face, so that he could find ‘the precise tone of flesh’. Rather than starting with an outline of his figures, he would first recreate the face in perfect detail, then haphazardly add on the body. ‘For Rousseau, a human being was a concrete object that could be constructed in the same manner as a piece of furniture,’ writes art historian Cornelia Stabenow.
It’s not hard to see why he was initially derided by critics and laughed at by the Parisian public. He also seemed to invite ridicule in his bombastic proclamations about the nature of his art. Was he being facetious? Or was he actually living the life of a prototype performance artist, who deliberately chose not to distinguish between the real and the fantastical? If nothing else, he was definitely sincere.
‘Nothing makes me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see,’ he once said.
Flights of fancy
What kind of nature could he possibly be observing? You wouldn’t exactly call Rousseau’s paintings accurate representations of their subject matter. It goes without saying that he never visited a jungle, although he claimed to be involved in the French army’s Mexican campaign between 1861–1867.
Stabenow thinks ‘…he did not distinguish between pictures and reality and in art as in life remained gullible to the end.’ His Jungle paintings were instead inspired by photographs of exotic animals, children’s picture books, and a botanical garden in Paris, Jardin des Plantes. For that matter, nothing in Rousseau’s realm belongs to the real world beyond a passing resemblance. And yet, there is something instinctively appealing about his lush landscapes and bright colours. Christopher Green describes them as ‘tropical forests for northern imaginations.’ — the idea of far-flung lands from the viewpoint of a provincial European. Even if baffled, the viewer is happy to observe his version of nature, in all its jumbled glory.
Still, there may be more to Rousseau’s vision than a whimsical dream safari. His works can conjure up complex emotions. Take War (1894) an imposingly large painting depicting an apocalyptic bloodbath. The figures here don’t have that tacked-on, superimposed quality: we are looking at a field of dead and mutilated bodies melting into the ground. Soaring above the carnage is a young girl on a black horse, supposedly the horseman War. You might laugh at the gormless animal if only you could ignore the savage expression of its rider. Somehow the jarring contradictions of silliness and terror enhance the intensity of the painting, rather than diminish it.
Rousseau’s logic belongs to tranquil dreams that occasionally tip into nightmare territory. Anticipating Surrealism, dreams are sometimes his subject matter as well as style. With The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) the artist attaches, in his characteristic manner, a descriptive caption:
‘Although the predatory animal is wild, it hesitates to leap upon its victim, who has fallen fast asleep from exhaustion.’
Despite having no foliage, the scene is immersive. The unsure look of the lion, the intensity of the moon, and the fact that there are no footprints in the sand create a strangely dramatic situation. The famous Jean Cocteau offered this by way of explanation: ‘The gipsy did not pass this way. She is here. She is not here. She has no human place. She lives in mirrors.’
This symbolic style would crop up in many works from early 20th century avant garde artists. Rousseau famously influenced The Blue Rider, a radical group of Expressionists based in Germany. But the artist himself was on his own wavelength, not really associated with a movement while he was active.
Feast and famine
From exotic landscapes to moments of mundane Parisian life, to stately portraits, scenes of war and his own self-claimed invention of ‘portrait-landscape’, there is little ground Rousseau didn’t cover within his limited means. Yet the progression of his artwork shows not so much a growing technical mastery as an assurance in its own entirely unique style.
Naive is the word commonly associated with Rousseau — used to describe an artist who doesn’t follow painting conventions due to lack of formal training. But the term may be misleading, since it implies the artist didn’t know what he was doing. Rousseau was not only consistent in style — his best paintings are full of detail and a rich use of colour.
Whatever it is that makes these paintings work, Pablo Picasso certainly saw it. If it wasn’t for the young artist by chance spotting a Rousseau on the streets of Paris we might not be taking him seriously at all. Picasso would famously hold a banquet in celebration of the painter in 1908, entertaining the most significant artists and writers of the day. ‘There is nothing odd about Rousseau. He is the most perfect representation of a distinctive and immutable logic,’ Picasso said of the painter. Picasso was already an acclaimed artist at this stage, but if not for Rousseau, he may not have found his distinctive style. While Picasso had to undo his years of training to paint like a child, for Rousseau, it came naturally.
The last years of Rousseau’s life were finally presenting him with some semblance of recognition, if not outright financial success. He made friends with enfant terrible Alfred Jarry, emerging artist Robert Delauney and writer Guillame Apollinaire and was respected by an emerging wave of Primitivism artists who were looking for validation for their back to basics approach. 1908 was also the year of his first solo exhibition. But he arguably remained an anomaly.
After a notorious attempt at bank fraud in 1907, he used his percieved naivity as testament to his innocence — and was handed a suspended sentence. Not that this would slow him down: he would go on to paint his most famous piece, The Dream, in 1910, before dying of blood-poisoning. This painting more than any of his previous represents the collision of dream and reality that underpinned his artistic life.
‘If my parents had recognised my gift for painting… today I would have been the greatest and wealthiest painter in France,’ he claimed. We know this isn’t true. If anything, his genius depends on the circumstances that led him, like a lame donkey, to painting. There’s no formula for being an artist — just a restless imagination and the willingness to pick up a brush.
