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Henri Rousseau

The Repast of the Lion
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The Repast of the Lion


Henri Rousseau (May 21, 1844 - September 2, 1910) was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naive or Primitive manner. He is also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer) after his place of employment. Ridiculed during his life, he is now seen as an untaught genius whose works are of the highest artistic quality. His work "The Sleeping Gypsy" (1897), which shows a lion musing over a sleeping man in eerie moonlight, is one of the best-known works of the modern era.

Henri Rousseau was born in 1844 in a small town called Laval, France. He didn’t start painting until he was forty, before that, he served in the army and then worked in a tollbooth on the edge of Paris. Rousseau’s most famous paintings are of jungles which is surprising because Henri never saw a jungle, he never left France, but he got his inspiration from illustrated books and the botanical gardens in Paris.

Because Rousseau had never had any artistic training, he wasn’t influenced by any particular art school and he had a very particular style. One of the things Henri did that is and was a very new good was a new kind of painting which he called portrait landscape. This style meant that he would start by drawing a landscape such as a stunning view or a favourite part of a city and paint a person in the foreground. One of the problems with being a self-taught artist was that Rousseau had many critics and many people were shocked by his work. People were constantly saying that Rousseau painted like a child and did not know what he was doing but if you take a close look at his work you can see how many complex, effective techniques he used. Henri’s first jungle painting, ‘Surprise’ which can be seen in the National Gallery, it is one of only two Rousseaus in England, is a very good example. First of all, this artist painted in layers starting with a sky at the very back and ending with the animals or people in the foreground. The rain in the picture ‘Surprise’ is done in a way that no other painter has ever done but it is thought that Rousseau used some kind of varnish. The grass at the base of the picture is done in bunches of about five strands this would take a long time to do using one brush and it looks as though the artist thought up a clever way of creating this effect. When Rousseau painted jungles he used a great variety of greens, someone once counted them up and it came to over fifty. Henri Rousseau spent a long time on each painting, this meant that he did not do many so they are now worth a lot of money. It is strange to think that although somebody could probably sell a Rousseau for ten million pounds Rousseau himself was quite a poor man; in fact he used student grade paint.

Pablo Picasso saw a painting by Rousseau being sold on the street as a canvas to be painted over. Picasso instantly recognised Henri’s genius and so he went to meet him. He decided to hold a banquet in Rousseau’s honour which was half serious, half burlesque. Some of Picasso’s abstract people resemble Rousseau’s ‘childish’ style. His ingenuousness was extreme, and he was not aware that establishment artists considered him untutored. In 1908 Picasso gave a banquet, half serious half burlesque, in his honor.

Henri Rousseau passed away in 1910 and was interred in the Cimetičre de Bagneux.




Last updated: 10-24-2004 05:10:45