England has two great Francis Bacon, one philosopher and one painter, and france has two Rousseau, one philosopher and the other— painter, yes. Today we talk about the French painter Henri Rousseau, born in 1844.
When the tax collector decides to paint
Rousseau was only four years younger than Claude Monet, who was born in 1840, and we all know that Monet established Impressionism and was already a world-renowned master when he was alive; Rousseau did not follow the dazzling Impressionism of that era, nor did he aspire to devote himself to art and train hard like other artists from a young age. Painting was first and foremost an amateur interest for Rousseau, but he devoted himself to this interest with full enthusiasm, sincerity and effort.
Rousseau was a petty tax collector who, since 1871, had levied property taxes on merchants entering the city at the gates of Paris. Rousseau would have lived his life plainly, but at the age of forty he began to want to paint seriously. Although briefly instructed by two academic painters, Rousseau was basically self-taught.
Although Rousseau himself did not have the bohemian atmosphere of an artist, he still wanted others to see his works. In 1886 he participated for the first time in the Salon des Indépendants, an unjudged and welcoming salon for "A Carnival Evening" (A Carnival Evening).
Henri Rousseau' A Carnival Evening
If you look closely, the bare branches in the background and the residual light of the sunset change
In fact, it shows that Rousseau still mastered a certain degree of painting skills
The viewer reacted to the painting to the extreme, and the general audience at that time mostly had an academic and anti-academic (mainly impressionist) view, and the painting was made fun of for being flat, lacking in depth, and had no skill to speak of, like a child's painting. On the other hand, Carnival Night was favored by a few, such as the Impressionist master Camille Pissarro, who praised the painting for its "precision of lightness and richness of tones". However, whether good or bad, these comments do not seem to affect Rousseau, who continues to paint in his own way and continues to exhibit until his death.
Henri Rousseau
Picasso's banquet to Rousseau
In recent years, there have been retrospectives by Rousseau in major European art galleries, but he never broke into the Parisian art scene during his lifetime. Fortunately, he was loved by leading Parisian artists and writers, one of whom was Pablo Picasso. Picasso, who was just beginning to appear in the art world at the time, found that Rousseau's Portrait of a Woman was sold as a cheap reusable canvas in a second-hand shop in Paris (let the poor painter paint on it with a layer of paint), and Picasso thought that the painter of this painting was a genius, so he bought the "canvas" at a very low price and went home and cherished it for the rest of his life.
Picasso then took the initiative to get acquainted with Rousseau, and in 1908, shortly before Rousseau's death, Picasso invited him to a banquet on the washing ship (Bateau-Lavoir) where his studio was located. A group of young artists and poets, including the Surrealist Max Jacob and the art collector Gertrude Stein, became the famous "Le Banquet Rousseau" in art history. Rousseau had a deep influence on later modern art, including Fauvism and Surrealism in addition to Picasso.
Jungle painter in fantasy
Looking back at Rousseau's modest artistic career, we will immediately find that he was particularly fascinated by painting the jungle (especially the scene of predators). He himself said that the animals in his jungle paintings came from military service in Mexico, but there was no evidence that Rousseau had served in Mexico, and he had never even been out of France in his lifetime. A more reliable account is that he referred to illustrations and animal atlases from children's books, visited botanical gardens and zoos in France, and listened to returning French soldiers about their experiences fighting in the jungles of a foreign country.
From the point of view of technique, as well as biology and physics, Rousseau's paintings can be said to be full of ills: the tiger's teeth are the same size; the leaves on which the tiger steps on support it firmly, not folded in the slightest, which is obviously contrary to physics; the tigers in the two paintings are almost identical, but like mirror images, which are likely to be reused from old materials; a horse is smaller than the leaves of wild grasses; the plants in the botanical garden are enlarged as tropical plants; the size of the dogs on the same picture that are different from the viewpoint is ten times different; and so on. But are these painting ills really important?
Rousseau lacked the ingenuity of the academic school, and his paintings did not have exquisite perspective, precise light and shadow representations, and convincing flora and fauna details. All of this technique and knowledge is ultimately intended to deceive the eye (trompe-l'œil), but Rousseau's paintings are not realistic, and he never intends to capture real objects for the purpose of painting.
Rousseau's The Football Players
With an inexplicable sense of joy, eerieness and even absurdity
Rousseau also did not have the impressionist painting to rebel against the inherent form, he did not like the Impressionists who painstakingly wanted to capture the moments of light and shadow in the flowing world, nor did he like the post-Impressionism Sanjie (Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin) who got rid of the Impressionist brushstrokes and invested strong personal emotions on the scenes they painted.
Rousseau does not seek to paint accurately or correspond to reality, and he makes up for the unclear imagination, and his works show a complete, unified world, with a naïve and simple temperament, with no other purpose. There is indeed a kind of childishness in his paintings, so critics point out that his portraits of children are also correct to some extent. We can further say that Rousseau painted a space of fantasy and dreams, which explains that he said that the paintings originated from his own military experience, not simply lying, but that he had always lived in some kind of fantasy.
The Sleeping Gypsy
Probably one of Rousseau's most famous paintings
In the static picture, there is an unsettling tension
It is reminiscent of the later surrealist Dalí and Margaret
Perhaps what rousseau sees is the pure love for painting, and the original heart as a painter and artist, which is this pure attraction to the viewer.
More Rousseau works:
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