The Brooklyn Rail

Henri Rousseau, an artist known for his dreamlike jungle scenes and uncanny portraits of identical mustachioed men, has long fascinated art historians. Yet his life and work remain, at heart, enigmatic. Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets, now on view at the Barnes Foundation (and traveling to the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris next year), resists the impulse to decode him. Instead, through an incredible curatorial feat bringing together nearly sixty major works, the exhibition revels in his strangeness, the peculiar poetics that make Rousseau’s art as confounding as it is delightful. It’s a show that chronicles the absurdities for both pleasure and reflection and embraces the fun of not knowing. And, it’s a show that is only fitting to be shown at these two institutions, which together hold the most significant collections of his work in the world.

Perhaps the most persistent misconception about Rousseau is that his celebrated jungle scenes—teeming with monkeys, tigers, and lush tropical foliage—were inspired by firsthand experience. In fact, Rousseau never left France. His visions of the exotic were assembled from sources close to home: the botanical displays at the Jardin des Plantes, illustrated books, and taxidermy. Unlike contemporaries such as Paul Gauguin, who traveled abroad and exoticized the cultures he encountered, Rousseau’s imagined jungles are less colonial fantasy than childlike invention—celebrations of the imaginative rather than appropriations of the foreign. Amazingly, Rousseau did little to correct the myths surrounding his supposed travels, allowing the fiction and mysticism to add to his persona.

His lack of travel, paired with his self-taught status, accounts for the distinctly flat, awkward style of painting for which Rousseau is known. This is made clear at the start of the exhibition with bizarre scenes of marriage and displaced women who find themself in faraway landscapes. In one early work from 1899, Rousseau commemorates his second marriage to Joséphine Noury by portraying himself and his betrothed in a lush pastoral landscape. Floating in the clouds above, however, are the heads of Rousseau’s first wife and Noury’s late spouse, honoring the new union. At the time, spirit photography—in which photographers attempted to capture images of ghosts—was in vogue. In other works on view in the first gallery, well-dressed women in petticoats and gloves are seemingly plucked from the cafes and streets of Paris and inserted in lush forests or spooky, desolate landscapes. In Carnival Evening (1886), the first painting he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, Rousseau depicts a couple dressed up in carnival attire, a Pierrot and a Venetian ball gown, set in an eerie evening in the woods, the trees spindly with wire-thin branches. These scenes of clandestine encounters in the forest reflect the influence of popular romance novels of the time, in which the allure of mystery and unresolved narratives captivated readers and viewers alike.

Though his works are all inherently strange, the most intriguing is War (La guerre) (ca. 1894), in which a female figure with a sword and torch seems to jump on horseback over a landscape filled with dead and mangled bodies that are being eaten by crows. According to the wall text, she is a personification of combat, inspired by the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870 and the subsequent Commune of 1871. This work stands out for its visceral depiction of violence and anger—qualities that sharply contrast with the neighboring room’s more whimsical scenes of oversized dogs in carriages and cats at play.

In another gallery, Rousseau’s sense of community comes into focus through portraits of familiar Parisians. One depicts Charlotte Papouin, the daughter of a stonemason; another portrays a local grocer and his family. Though likely painted on commission, these works belong to a genre Rousseau claimed to have invented—the “portrait-landscape,” in which the setting reveals details about the sitter’s life and surroundings. Yet just as telling as the subjects themselves is the afterlife of these paintings and the artistic community that later embraced them. Portrait of Madame M. (ca. 1895) was famously purchased by Pablo Picasso in 1908 for only five francs—initially for the canvas, though he soon made it the centerpiece of a legendary banquet in Rousseau’s honor. The Rabbit's Meal (Le repas du lapin) (1908), once owned by the grocer Pére Junier, may have, according to Sonia Delaunay’s recollection, been rediscovered in his shop by Delaunay herself in 1911. Together, these stories trace how Rousseau’s art, rooted in everyday Parisian life, would come to captivate the avant-garde that surrounded him.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a Rousseau show without incredible depictions of tropical landscapes. Two large galleries at the close of the exhibition are reserved for this very subject, leaving the best for last. In some works, monkeys hang out on rocks or swing from branches; in others, a nude goddess stands near a bear and a hunter, the story still unfolding. The latter work, Unpleasant Surprise (Mauvaise surprise) (1899–1901), in the Barnes Collection, sits alongside two major loans: The Sleeping Gypsy (La Bohémienne endormie) (1897) from the MoMA, and The Snake Charmer (1907) from the Musee d’Orsay. Seen together, these works capture Rousseau’s dreamlike magic and penchant for delightful imagination. His jungles are not places of reality, but of his mind’s eye, where fantasy and emotion take the place of logic, and where the wild becomes a stage for the mysteries of the human mind.