Henri Rousseau: naïve, enigmatic, tragic

The exhibition Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets takes place at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia from October to February 2026 and travels to the Orangerie in Paris from March to July 2026. It is accompanied by a hefty catalogue (which weighs four and a half pounds), the core of which is 18 paintings by Rousseau (1844-1910) in the Barnes Collection (it is edited by Christopher Green and Nancy Ireson, Philadelphia: Barnes Foundation, 2025.)

The Barnes also owns many works by Cézanne, Matisse, Renoir and Modigliani, including his portraits of Beatrice Hastings and his patron and dealer Leopold Zborowski.  There’s one notable error in the catalogue: Man Ray did not move to Paris until 1921 and could not have taken the photograph of Rousseau in 1910.

The great fortune of Dr Albert Barnes, a chemist, came from the invention of Argyrol, a silver nitrate antiseptic used to treat lung and eye infections, still used by ophthalmic surgeons.  In 1994, in order to visit the Barnes Foundation in Merion, seven miles from Philadelphia, I had to send them my professional qualifications and make an appointment to gain privileged admission to the delightfully empty Holy of Holies.  The Barnes Foundation began in 1922 but by 2012 needed money to survive.  It then became a public institution, moved from a cloistered mansion in the suburbs and became a public museum in the centre of the city.

Barnes bought most of his paintings from the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume, but this catalogue does not give his background. The son of a humble bank messenger from the Jura in eastern France, Guillaume was born in Paris in 1891.  He began his career as clerk in a garage that imported African rubber for car tires.  The suppliers also offered him African statues, which he began to collect and sell.  Suave and self-confident, with a talent for attracting publicity, he soon met the writers Apollinaire and Max Jacob.  They introduced him to Modigliani, who painted his dapper portrait.  Guillaume opened his own gallery on the fashionable Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré in 1915 and continued to sell art as competition faded during the war.

The catalogue considers Rousseau’s works in the context of his biography and social background.  Though scholarly and loaded with endnotes, this welcome tribute to a gifted and unusual artist is lively and interesting.  Rousseau worked at a tollgate from 1871 to 1893, collected local taxes for the city of Paris and was known as “Douanier”.  An anticlerical republican, he was considered crafty and secretive, vain and hateful, as well as warm and kind.  An inept criminal and extremely poor, he was twice convicted of petty crimes.  He first cheated his employer out of stamps and a small sum of money; then, in a disastrous get-rich scheme, he persuaded an accomplice to forge a letter that enabled him to cash false checks and obtain 1,000 francs.

Once reduced to only fifteen centimes for dinner, Rousseau often had to beg for money. A friend recalled: “I don’t believe he ever had a suit of clothes to wear but the one he wore, and the frugality of his meals was something that would break anybody’s heart.” He often exchanged his pictures to settle bills with local tradesmen and even to pay his lawyer.  Some of his paintings were considered so worthless that other artists used his old canvases to paint their own work.  Rousseau died an alcoholic, impoverished and alone, and was buried without a headstone in a communal cemetery.  He was as desperately poor as Pissarro and Modigliani, and like theirs, his achievement was not recognised till long after his death.  In 2023 his painting Les Flamants (“The Flamingos”) sold for $43.5 million.

Rousseau’s work was “rejected by the academic establishment, scorned by most critics and the public, and both admired and mocked by the avant-garde in turn-of-the-century Paris.  His paintings have elicited strong emotional reactions since he first exhibited them at the Salon des Refusés in 1885.”  But his art was admired by the writers Alfred Jarry and Apollinaire, and by the French artist Robert Delaunay and the Italian Futurist Ardengo Soffici.

This catalogue does not describe a famous feast.  John Richardson writes that in November 1908, to celebrate Picasso’s new acquisition of Rousseau’s five-franc painting from a junk shop and take up “his offer to play the violin, Picasso decided to organize a ‘banquet’ in the Douanier’s honour in his studio, the Bateau Lavoir.”  The guests included Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Leo and Gertrude Stein.  Apollinaire recited a poem, Georges Braque played the guitar, Marie Laurencin sang.  The food arrived late, and everyone began by opening the abundant bottles of wine and eating tinned sardines.  “The guest of honour, idiot savant of art, wept tears of tipsy joy” at the adulation in this drunken party.

Rousseau was a self-taught artist with an idiosyncratic style that resembled naïve folk art.  He was both realistic and fantastic, enigmatic and witty.  “He claimed that his only teacher was nature,” but he saw his wild animals from the Paris zoo and the Museum of Natural History, his jungles from the glasshouses of the Jardin des Plantes.

He first drew the whole picture on the canvas, “then painted one colour at a time, using many tones of each.”  He said he had as many as 22 greens.

He lived near and copied art in the Louvre, and many of his paintings follow the traditional subjects of great artists.  For example:

Rousseau’s Eve in Earthly Paradise and Titian’s The Fall of Man;

Henri Rousseau – Eve in the Garden of Eden

Unpleasant Surprise and rescuing a maiden in Uccello’s St. George and the Dragon;

The Rabbit’s Meal and Dürer’s Young Hare;

A Centennial of Independence and Brueghel’s The Peasant Dance;

Henri Rousseau, A Centennial of Independence, 1892

The Past and the Present and the wedding in Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride;

The Dream and Delacroix’s The Lion Hunt;

Snake Charmer and the nude in Gauguin’s Delightful Land;

Outskirts of Paris and Utrillo’s French Village Street;

Carnival Evening and the spooky, moonlit landscape in René Magritte’s Towards the End of 1940.

Artillerymen portrays fourteen moustachioed men in kepis, buttoned blue tunics, white trousers and dark boots standing on or sitting next to a long cannon that’s supported by a huge wheel.  Their officer, dressed in white, stands to the left of his men with his hands in his pockets.  The four swords and three rifles of the men’s old cavalry days are plunged into the thick grass that surrounds them.  The mood is both martial and, as stiffly staged, slightly comic.

In The Ship in the Storm, “Obscurest night involved the sky, the Atlantic billows roared.”  A tan-colored, three-deck passenger ship with all the frightened passengers hidden inside, has four funnels and tight wire cables supporting the two tilted masts.  Tossed around by strong Japanese-style waves and under streaks of windswept driving rain (like the heavy gale in Rousseau’s Tiger in a Tropical Storm) the ship has little chance of survival.  It seems to represent Blaise Pascal’s perilous condition humaine.

Henri Rousseau – The Boat in the Storm

Beneath a wide blue sky in The Representatives of Foreign Powers Coming to Greet the Republic as a Sign of Peace a crowd of mummified, bearded and elaborately uniformed figures—including a Turk, Arab, African and half-naked Indian— stand pompously on a quay under a broad canopy that welcomes them with sixteen foreign flags.  A huge red-cloaked, blond-haired figure of peace crowns the nearest men with an olive branch, which also appears in three pots in the foreground.  A statue-like, long-maned, peaceful lion sits next to them.  In the right background the windows of the tall square brown buildings display another array of flags.  Well-dressed women and children celebrate the occasion by dancing in a circle beneath a large iron statue that stands on a massive rectangular plinth adorned with more small flags.

Henri Rousseau – The Representatives of Foreign Powers Coming to Greet the Republic as a Sign of Peace

In a dense jungle of The Dream, scarcely lit by a full craterous moon, two wide-eyed motionless lions stare as if spellbound by the naked odalisque.  With full breasts, arms extended and feet crossed, she’s reclining on a soft brown sofa.  Her simian face is in profile, her ample body confronts the viewer and her two long braids touch her ample thigh.  A shy incongruous elephant lies hidden in the tropical foliage beneath exotic birds and globes of orange fruit depending from a tree.  In the best chapter, on Rousseau’s nudes, Martha Lucy observes that he introduces exotic and titillating wild animals, next to her flowing hair and flushed face, to “create a tension that heightens the erotic charge and alludes to the beastly origins of sexual desire.”

Henri Rousseau – Le Rêve

The background  of Unpleasant Surprise reveals a gleaming pink light on the tranquil blue lake, and soft grey mountains beneath a sun-streaked sky that echo the curves of the woman’s sensual body.  The title is ironically, almost comically, understated since the woman seems to be in mortal danger.  She’s threatened by the frozen (or possibly stuffed) brown bear whose bright dagger fangs and curved claws spike next to her bare toes and seem ready to tear her flesh.  The rocky foreground frames the bear and woman, and the three figures form a V-shaped triangle repeated in the forks of the branches and the fold of the hills.

Henri Rousseau Mauvaise surprise

Though standing naked and exposed, next to her discarded tan cloak and boots, she’s protected by her long blond hair, her supplicating raised palms, and her wrists that touch her aureole and nipple.  She doesn’t take the leaf on the branch near her head to hide her nakedness.  A tree trunk rises between the woman and the bear, and the water in the lake subtly shows through the beast’s open mouth.  She moves her left leg ahead toward the bear, and its hairy dark fur contrasts with her pale white skin.  The bear—more of a Teddy than a Grizzly—does not seem to notice that he’s been shot, in a puff of smoke, by the lance-like flintlock rifle of the hunter.  The marksman is enveloped in a black cloak that shows only his upper face and hands, and his half-hidden features contrast with her fully exposed body.

Rousseau remarked, but didn’t explain why, “although the predatory animal is wild, it hesitates to leap upon its victim.”  One contributor calls Unpleasant Surprise, which combines disparate elements to create a dramatic effect, “a drama that defies all easy readings.”  Viewers still wonder why the bear, scenting its potential prey, doesn’t devour the woman.  I think that, like Saint Jerome with a tame lion at his feet, the bare woman has created a mystical union with her bear.  Their powerful silent bond explains the restrained and humane behavior of the beast.

The title of Negro Attacked by a Jaguar (1910, Basel Kunstmuseum) has been changed under PC pressure to Jungle Landscape with Setting Sun.  The setting recalls Joseph Conrad’s description in Heart of Darkness: the impenetrable forest “was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.”  Under a low burning sun in a hazy blue sky, enveloped by tall erect pink and yellow flowers and red-topped cacti, and oppressed by a wild proliferation of sword-like leaves dropping from tree branches, a standing spotted jaguar digs his claws into a doomed African who cannot possibly escape.  Rousseau’s portraits and landscapes are static but, one contributor notes, his “action-packed jungle pictures are dramatically played out with extravagant energy.”

Negro Attacked by a Jaguar, 1910 – Henri Rousseau

I put this painting on the jacket of my first book, Fiction and the Colonial Experience (1973), to symbolise the European powers seizing helpless Africa.  Rousseau himself—a convicted criminal who served time in prison, lacked recognition, lived in humiliating poverty, and suffered the unimaginably tragic deaths of his two wives and five of his six children—saw the world emotionally and financially tearing him apart.  I believe he portrayed himself as the helpless victim of assaults by the savage big cats—lion, tiger, leopard and jaguar— in his jungle pictures.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Painting and the Novel, Impressionist Quartet, biographies of Wyndham Lewis and Modigliani, and a book on the Canadian realist painter Alex Colville. 

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