La Bohémienne endormie, 1897
Moi-même, portrait paysage, 1890
Sometimes, the simple action of crossing a river can have drastic consequences, like Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, in 49 BC. Not every crossing needs to be so consequential. For example, the painter Douanier Rousseau became Henri Rousseau when moving from the Musée d’Orsay to the Musée de l’Orangerie, just across the Seine. Yet, this small change in the way he is named says a lot about his stature as an artist. The Musée d’Orsay’s 2016 exhibition was called L'Innocence Archaïque (“archaic innocence"). It looked at Rousseau’s paintings as the work of a charming primitive artist with a wild imagination in love with jungles, a Sunday painter who stumbled upon art. The Musée de L’Orangerie, across the river, looks at him from a completely different perspective. Henri Rousseau is seen as a full fledged artist who had his very own point of view. “We wanted to look at Rousseau as the ambitious artist he really was,” explained the exhibition’s curator, Juliette Degennes.
Born in 1844 in Laval, a town in Western France, in a family of modest means, Henri Rousseau worked as a municipal employee until he was 49 years old to sustain himself. It’s only in 1885 that he was able to rent his first atelier, but he started painting full time only in 1893 after he retired from his job for the city of Paris collecting taxes (hence the name “douanier", i.e., customs agent). “Born in Laval in 1844, because of the lack of money from his parents he was obliged to first follow another career than the one his artistic taste yearned for,” wrote Henri Rousseau in his autobiography. “It’s only in the year 1885 that he started in art after many obstacles, alone, without any master other than nature and a few advice from Gérôme (the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme) and Clément (Félix-August Clément).”
La Charmeuse de serpents, 1907
The Musée de L’Orangerie exhibition shows the full range of Henri Rousseau as a painter. We see not only his most famous works, but his more commercial paintings to appeal to a larger spectrum of collectors. The 50 paintings come mostly from the Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia, and the Orangerie, in Paris. Both institutions were connected by one man. Art dealer Paul Guillaume, an early admirer of the work of Henri Rousseau, was instrumental in Alfred Barnes buying 18 of Douanier's works. Some paintings, like Rousseau’s masterpiece, La Bohémienne Endormie, were lent by New York’s MoMA, others from Prague or the Beyeler Foundation, in Basel.
At first, Rousseau was seen as an amateur painter, except for some artists who early on recognized his genius, like Félix Vallotton, or collectors, like Paul Guillaume, Modigliani’s merchant, whose collection founded the Musée de l’Orangerie. Rousseau paints more commercial works - flowers, sea landscapes, still lives - in smaller formats to suit the taste of more modest collectors and also that they could afford. People even ask him to paint family portraits like La Noce (1905) or Pour Fêter Bébé (1903).
Fleurs & Dahlia dans un vase, circa 1904
The artist became famous with his invention of "portraits in landscapes” (portrait paysage), like Promenade dans la forêt (1886) or Femme se prominent dans une forêt exotique (1889), depicting characters surrounded by a more and more present vegetation which becomes a character equal to the subject of the painting. They are a prelude to his jungle portraits. Rousseau’s contemporaries believed the jungles were born after a trip to Mexico during his military service. But , just before his death, Rousseau admitted he had never been outside of France. He was inspired by images of the French colonial empire he would see in newspapers as well as by his visits to the Museum of natural history. The last room presents 3 masterpieces: La Charmeuse de serpents, which comes from the Musée d’Orsay, Mauvaise surprise, from the Barnes Foundation, and La Bohémienne endormie, from New York’s MoMA. Rousseau tried multiple times, without success, to sell La Bohémienne endormie (The sleeping gypsy woman), probably his most famous painting. Shown at the 1897 Salon des Indépendants, the painting was ridiculed for his subject matter and the way the scene was depicted. La Bohémienne disappeared and was discovered in 1920 on the walls of a man selling coal. In 1926, it sold for 520.000 francs - more than Matisse or Cézanne ! In 1897, he had offered to sell it to the town of Laval, his birthplace for “2.000 or 1.800 francs. I would be happy for the city of Laval to have a souvenir of one of its children,” he wrote. It was bought by an American collector before entering the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1939 through a gift from Olga H. Guggenheim. In 2023, Les Flamants was sold at Christie’s for 43.5 million dollars ! Henri Rousseau, who did not have enough money for a proper burial, was finally recognized as the great artist he had been during his 23 year career.
– Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Mauvais surprise, 1899-1901
Henri Rousseau, L’Ambition de la Peinture. Musée de l’Orangerie. Until July 20, 2026. musee-orangerie.fr
