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Henri Rousseau, La Guerre, 1894 (détail)
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Guerre_
Exposition "Apocalypse : Hier et demain" - Bibliothèque nationale de France - site François-Mitterrand - du 4 février au 8 juin 2025
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Flower ☮ Power
Росіяни, любіть не війну 💛💙
Russians, Make Love, Not War💛💙
Русские, Занимайтесь любовью, а не войной💛💙
Artist | Henri Rousseau (1844-1910 in France)
Title | La Noce (1905)
oil on canvas
163 x 114 cm
Exhibitor | Musée de l'Orangerie
www.musee-orangerie.fr/en/artworks/la-noce-196428
At first sight, we are looking at a photographic portrait of a wedding. The protagonists in formal dress pose for the photographer. Strangely, however, the bride seems to be floating in the air. The bride’s veil is on top of the grandmother’s dress, contradicting the perspective suggested by placing the characters at different levels in the composition. A clumsy mistake? In fact it is intentional, it has been repainted and is therefore the artist’s deliberate choice. The bride, all in white, is like an apparition suspended in the air.
Here again, Rousseau plays with introducing an element of strangeness into the real world. The dog in the foreground, comically oversized and awkward, acts as a repoussoir or device to take the eye deep into the composition. Le Douanier asserts his position as the master of spatial paradox.
The group is framed by stylised trees that are too small and have improbable foliage.
The sky is an intense blue, ethereal. The trees and the yellow ochre background form a kind of mandorla around the group. Basler compares them to the idealised figures of medieval frescoes and the ex-votos of the Primitive masters.
MOP001
Artist | Henri Rousseau (1844-1910 in France)
Title | Le Navire dans la tempête (1899)
oil on canvas
77 x 65 cm
Exhibitor | Musée de l'Orangerie
Was it the appeal of the voyage that prompted Rousseau to paint this ship? Except that this trip is nothing like a pleasure cruise.
According to Jean-Pierre Labiau: "The sea, looking as if it has been cut out of sheet metal, and the sky resembling a stage backdrop, recall the swing boats in sideshows at a funfair" (1). Rousseau might also have taken his inspiration from the panorama in the 1889 Universal Exhibition.
The ship seems to be an amalgam of different models. It has portholes like an ocean liner and a cutwater like a battleship. This combination was also seen in the toy boats of the time. Rousseau might have had these in mind or could have taken his inspiration from an advertisement. The third unevenly spaced funnel was like that on the cruiser D’Entrecasteaux launched in 1896.
Whatever the case, Rousseau took his inspiration from folk arts. In an article in the Italian magazine La Voce published by Soffici, Rousseau talks about his fascination for "the paintings of simple men" - signs, ex-votos and decorations on fairground stalls.
www.musee-orangerie.fr/en/artworks/le-navire-dans-la-temp...
MOP026
Artist | Henri Rousseau (1844-1910 in France)
Title | La Carriole du Père Junier (1908)
oil on canvas
129 x 161.5 x 11 cm
Exhibitor | Musée de l'Orangerie
"Père Junier" used to sell vegetables that he would go to buy every morning from the market gardeners in Bagneux or Verrière-le-Buisson. He had been a friend of Rousseau’s for many years; his wife used to cook for him. As the painter owed him some money and M. Junier had just bought a horse of which he was very proud, it was agreed that Rousseau would do a painting of it.
Rousseau worked from a photograph. However he made several important changes that reveal his creative process. He omitted a tree on the boulevard and played particularly on the size and position of the three dogs. These have a visual function. The fat black dog gives depth to the cart. We know that when Max Weber commented to Rousseau that the black dog was too big in relation to the overall scale of the painting, the artist retorted that his painting demanded this. The miniature dog, on the other hand, trotting in front of the cart gives a monumentality to the mare. She stands rather curiously on the tips of her hooves, thus highlighting the shadows cast on the ground. This mare, like a dancer on her points, seems almost suspended in space. Rousseau was very fond of this type of paradox, which makes some characters float in a purely pictorial space.
The passengers in the cart, with the exception of Monsieur Junier, are shown in strict frontality like Byzantine icons.
www.musee-orangerie.fr/en/artworks/la-carriole-du-pere-ju...
MOP025
Artist | Henri Rousseau (1844-1910 in France)
Title | L'Enfant à la poupée (1904-1905)
oil on canvas
88 x 72.5 x 8.5 cm
Exhibitor | Musée de l'Orangerie
The child looking straight at you comes over as a disturbing, hypnotic figure. Her features have nothing childlike about them. Her body looks gigantic and disproportionate. Her legs, which disappear rather strangely into the grass, are enormous in relation to her arms, particularly her right arm, which is holding a popular cardboard doll. The body is represented in "Egyptian style" with the upper part of the body seen face on and the legs seen from the side. It is virtually two-dimensional, and the white dots on the little girl’s red dress accentuate the flatness of the figure, which seems to have been literally stuck on to the background.
The landscape is severely reduced: an almost uniformly blue sky and a meadow dotted with flowers resembling a medieval tapestry. However Rousseau creates a slight impression of perspective by darkening the grass in the distance and reducing the size of the daisies. The shading under the child’s thighs recalls an illuminated manuscript.
Rousseau rediscovered the aesthetic of the French and Italian "primitives" in an era that was fascinated by Primitivism in all genres. It was an aspect of his art that fascinated his contemporaries and which prompted André Lhote to write: "In the Middle Ages, he would have delighted the crowd...", and Arsène Alexandre to call him "the Paolo Ucello of our century."
www.musee-orangerie.fr/en/artworks/lenfant-la-poupee-196422
MOP027
Artist | Henri Rousseau (1844-1910 in France)
Title | Les Pêcheurs à la ligne (1908-1909)
oil on canvas
96.5 x 115.5 cm
Exhibitor | Musée de l'Orangerie
Rousseau liked to depict ordinary people at leisure. Here, the aeroplane flying overhead introduces a modern touch into the composition, as does the factory chimney in the background.
Rousseau depicted airships and aeroplanes several times in his work, which made him a pioneer in representing modernity. This theme would be widely taken up by the painter Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), who greatly admired Rousseau’s work. The conquest of the skies, the great challenge of the era, was the top story in the press. The aeroplane is perfectly recognisable: it is the biplane of Wilbur Wright (1867-1912), the American pioneer who, with his brother, Orville Wright (1871-1948) organised public flights from Le Mans in 1908, and whose image was circulated in Le Petit Journal illustré de la jeunesse on 27 December 1908 and in the Petit Journal on 5 September 1909.
The beach, or strip of ochre coloured earth, separates the fishermen’s space from the houses. It slopes down on the right of the painting, which means that the houses, depicted frontally, sit oddly in the space as their base follows the curve of the ground. Similarly, the fishermen, whose feet are cropped, seem to be placed on the water, or rather, stuck on to the strip of land.
www.musee-orangerie.fr/en/artworks/les-pecheurs-la-ligne-...
MOP022
On display in the National Gallery, London.
A tiger crouches in the foreground, surprised by man's arrival. By placing the trees along a diagonal axis, Rousseau has conveyed a sense of the wind, in spite of the painting's static and naive style.
By Henri ‘Douanier’ Rousseau (1844-1910).
The rest of the series and the prompt is here: www.trivialthingies.com/portfolio/an-evening-walk-with-mo...
The rest of the series and the prompt is here: www.trivialthingies.com/portfolio/an-evening-walk-with-mo...
The rest of the series and the prompt is here: www.trivialthingies.com/portfolio/an-evening-walk-with-mo...
The rest of the series and the prompt is here: www.trivialthingies.com/portfolio/an-evening-walk-with-mo...
The rest of the series and the prompt is here: www.trivialthingies.com/portfolio/an-evening-walk-with-mo...
from the museum label:
Carnival Evening
1886
Oil on canvas
Henri Rousseau
French
Born 1844, died 1910
An air of mystery pervades this wintry forest landscape. Dressed in festive carnival costumes, a lone couple stands in front of barren trees. The figures seem to shine from within rather than from the light of the moon, which has strangely left the forest in darkness. An unexplained face leers out from the empty hut beside the figures, and an unexpected street lamp incongruously glows nearby. Known for his fantastic scenes, Rousseau was a self-taught artist whose works appealed to the collectors and avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, including Pablo Picasso.
