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Lot Essay
Landscapes constitute by far the largest number of the Rousseau's paintings. Most are fairly small; he would make free oil sketches from nature but most were composed in his studio using motifs he drew during his long walks around Paris and its environs. He also relied on postcards and engravings of local and more distant sites. The views are often nondescript and hardly picturesque; nevertheless, much of the poetic charm and serene timelessness of these scenes stems from the banality of his motifs. He was partial to gray, working class neighborhoods and held no aversion to dingy factory buildings and warehouses. The Impressionists usually avoided such signs of the industrial revolution in their landscapes, although Seurat and the many of his Neo-Impressionist followers, many of whom held anarchist and socialist political views, felt an moral obligation to be truthful to the reality of their surroundings. While Rousseau shared these sympathies, he followed no agenda, and the appearance of the factory smokestack in the present painting, emerging from behind a small grove of trees, seems perfectly natural and matter-of-fact, no more or less so than the presence of a stroller, a horse or a dog.
The great imaginary jungle landscapes for which Rousseau is most famous present a dense and impenetrable world in which half-hidden and mysterious dramas unfold. His suburban landscapes, on the other hand, show a world that is entirely open to the viewer's gaze, with wide spaces and distant vistas under large and usually cloudless skies (the artist is careful to show a gray urban haze on the horizon, further evidence of the encroachment of modern industry). Roger Shattuck has noted that "Rousseau's landscapes are filled to an obsessive degree with means of communication: streets, country paths, bridges, vehicles, and more original, balloons and airplanes" (in "Object Lesson for Modern Art," Henri Rousseau, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 33). Small paths, like veins, crisscross the open field in the foreground of the present painting. In Rousseau's world each person, thing and landscape feature proclaims its individual character. Each building appears like a tiny self-contained fortress, lining the road with no apparent pattern or design. Yet all of these components fit comfortably together into a form a harmonious and holistic world, a "peaceable kingdom" in which everything has its place, and quietly gets along with everything else. In this democracy of images, nothing is more important than everything else, each thing possesses its own measure of enchantment, and a small dog in the foreground may appear larger than a woman standing nearby, despite the fact that they are roughly the same distance from the viewer.
In a statement for a biographical profile published in 1894, Rousseau wrote in the third person how "He has perfected himself more and more in the original manner which he has adopted and he is in the process of becoming one of our best realist painters" (quoted in R. Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant Garde in France, New York, 1968, p. 55). The artist's technique and compositional devices may appear naive and unsophisticated, but they are carefully calculated, and even conceal their skill. At first glance the viewer may assume the horizon line is continuous across the width of the view; however, the distant road suddenly disappears behind the factory hidden in the trees, and we become aware that these buildings are situated on a rise on the right side of the picture. The artist plays peekaboo with his subject, hiding the factory behind a grove of trees. The multiple horizon lines and inconsistent perspectives are as modernist as the oddly tilted planes in a Cézanne still-life. However, in Rousseau such spatial ambiguities rarely draw attention to themselves, and quietly contribute to the charm of the scene. Rousseau refuses to let the means of creating illusion take precedence over the reality he seeks to describe. Shattuck observes:
While composing a landscape within the confines of a frame, Rousseau preserved its appearance as landscape and also a simplified local color. He never practiced the obliteration of a scene by overexploiting its aspect of pure design or pure color. His fields are fields, not colored planes; his trees are trees, not simplified lines. (ibid., p. 90).
Rousseau's realism is an intensely felt literalness, in which he reveals the simple and essential character of his subjects. The critic Gustave Coquiot, one of the artist's earliest supporters, wrote that Rousseau possessed "such style, such inventiveness, such a deployment of rare qualities: and above all he offers such a love, such personal generosity, such a gift of his naked heart, such absence of falsehood, of insincerity, that we can rightly speak of Rousseau's contribution to painting as both generous and unique" (quoted in C. Lanchner and W. Rubin, "Henri Rousseau and Modernism," exh. cat., op. cit., p. 37).
The great imaginary jungle landscapes for which Rousseau is most famous present a dense and impenetrable world in which half-hidden and mysterious dramas unfold. His suburban landscapes, on the other hand, show a world that is entirely open to the viewer's gaze, with wide spaces and distant vistas under large and usually cloudless skies (the artist is careful to show a gray urban haze on the horizon, further evidence of the encroachment of modern industry). Roger Shattuck has noted that "Rousseau's landscapes are filled to an obsessive degree with means of communication: streets, country paths, bridges, vehicles, and more original, balloons and airplanes" (in "Object Lesson for Modern Art," Henri Rousseau, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 33). Small paths, like veins, crisscross the open field in the foreground of the present painting. In Rousseau's world each person, thing and landscape feature proclaims its individual character. Each building appears like a tiny self-contained fortress, lining the road with no apparent pattern or design. Yet all of these components fit comfortably together into a form a harmonious and holistic world, a "peaceable kingdom" in which everything has its place, and quietly gets along with everything else. In this democracy of images, nothing is more important than everything else, each thing possesses its own measure of enchantment, and a small dog in the foreground may appear larger than a woman standing nearby, despite the fact that they are roughly the same distance from the viewer.
In a statement for a biographical profile published in 1894, Rousseau wrote in the third person how "He has perfected himself more and more in the original manner which he has adopted and he is in the process of becoming one of our best realist painters" (quoted in R. Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant Garde in France, New York, 1968, p. 55). The artist's technique and compositional devices may appear naive and unsophisticated, but they are carefully calculated, and even conceal their skill. At first glance the viewer may assume the horizon line is continuous across the width of the view; however, the distant road suddenly disappears behind the factory hidden in the trees, and we become aware that these buildings are situated on a rise on the right side of the picture. The artist plays peekaboo with his subject, hiding the factory behind a grove of trees. The multiple horizon lines and inconsistent perspectives are as modernist as the oddly tilted planes in a Cézanne still-life. However, in Rousseau such spatial ambiguities rarely draw attention to themselves, and quietly contribute to the charm of the scene. Rousseau refuses to let the means of creating illusion take precedence over the reality he seeks to describe. Shattuck observes:
While composing a landscape within the confines of a frame, Rousseau preserved its appearance as landscape and also a simplified local color. He never practiced the obliteration of a scene by overexploiting its aspect of pure design or pure color. His fields are fields, not colored planes; his trees are trees, not simplified lines. (ibid., p. 90).
Rousseau's realism is an intensely felt literalness, in which he reveals the simple and essential character of his subjects. The critic Gustave Coquiot, one of the artist's earliest supporters, wrote that Rousseau possessed "such style, such inventiveness, such a deployment of rare qualities: and above all he offers such a love, such personal generosity, such a gift of his naked heart, such absence of falsehood, of insincerity, that we can rightly speak of Rousseau's contribution to painting as both generous and unique" (quoted in C. Lanchner and W. Rubin, "Henri Rousseau and Modernism," exh. cat., op. cit., p. 37).