{"id":399741,"date":"2026-04-19T05:37:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T05:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/399741\/"},"modified":"2026-04-19T05:37:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T05:37:15","slug":"no-one-is-laughing-any-more-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/399741\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018No one is laughing any more\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Henri Rousseau gave up his day job as a low-ranking collector of tax on wine unloaded from boats on the Seine, in Paris<\/a>, in 1893, when he was 49. He wanted to devote himself full-time to his passion for painting, which he had taken up eight years earlier.<\/p>\n

Rousseau exhibited at the Salon des Ind\u00e9pendants, the annual exhibition where entry was open to all, without selection by a jury. His early works were mocked, but over two decades his entries became a main focus of the salon. In 1910, the last year of Rousseau\u2019s life, he showed The Dream, a painting of a naked woman reclining, like Manet\u2019s Olympia, in the jungle. \u201cNo one is laughing any more,\u201d the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire wrote. \u201cAll are unanimous. They admire him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rousseau\u2019s large canvas entitled War created a sensation at the Salon des Ind\u00e9pendants in 1894. The artist had served briefly with a French infantry regiment, but he never saw battle. He had, however, seen bodies lined up on the streets of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which transformed him into a pacifist.<\/p>\n

War shows a crazed horsewoman posed side-saddle above her steed, brandishing a sword and smoking torch as the black horse gallops across a field of rubble and cadavers. Crows drink blood from severed limbs. Clouds appear tinged by blood. \u201cWar passes through, terrifying, leaving everywhere despair, tears and ruin,\u201d Rousseau wrote in his description.<\/p>\n

Today, as wars rage in the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere, Rousseau\u2019s painting remains a terrifying pictorial statement on the horror of humans slaughtering their own species, rivalled only by Picasso\u2019s Guernica.<\/p>\n

In his other great allegorical painting \u2014 entitled Foreign Representatives Salute the Republic in a Sign of Peace \u2014 Marianne, the symbol of France, holds an olive branch above the man who was president at the time, Armand Falli\u00e8res, and officials from Europe, Asia and Africa. Critics assumed the painting alluded to the second Hague peace conference. Rousseau wanted to sell it to the state, but it was instead bought by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who sold it to Picasso.<\/p>\n

Both works, along with more than 50 others by the artist, are on show at Henri Rousseau: The Ambition of Painting, an exhibition that runs at the Orangerie, in Paris, until July.<\/p>\n

\"HenriHenri Rousseau: War. Photograph: Patrice Schmidt\/Mus\u00e9e d’Orsay \"HenriHenri Rousseau: Representatives of Foreign Powers Salute the Republic in a Sign of Peace. Photograph: Adrienne Didierjean\/Mus\u00e9e National Picasso-Paris <\/p>\n

Rousseau was long known in France as \u201cle douanier\u201d, or the customs officer, the name given to him by young painters and writers who adopted him as a sort of ageing mascot. He was not in fact a customs officer but a subaltern clerk.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe called him Henri Rousseau [in the name of the exhibition] to give him the status of a painter and artist rather than a lowly clerk who painted in his spare time,\u201d explains Juliette Degennes, a curator at the Orangerie<\/a> and one of three commissioners of the exhibition, which was five years in the making. <\/p>\n

Over a quarter-century Rousseau produced about 250 canvases, of which 100 were lost. The Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia, which showed the exhibition before it moved to Paris, possesses 18 of Rousseau\u2019s paintings, the single largest collection. The Orangerie has the second-largest collection, with 11. <\/p>\n

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These paintings all passed through the hands of Paul Guillaume, the art dealer whose personal collection is the heart of the Orangerie. Guillaume sold many paintings to Dr Alfred Barnes, an American chemist and businessman, who decreed in his will that his paintings could not travel abroad. That was overturned in court in 2023, enabling the foundation to lend significant paintings to this exhibition. <\/p>\n

Rousseau did not mind being called a naive or primitive painter, names he associated with sincerity and honesty. The same labels were applied to his contemporary Paul C\u00e9zanne. <\/p>\n

Although Rousseau called himself a realist painter, he had no regard for accuracy in proportion, perspective or visual description. In the charming 1890 painting Myself, Portrait-Landscape, Rousseau painted himself as a giant, dwarfing tiny passersby on a quay of the Seine. The bird in Snake Charmer, from 1907, looks like a cross between a duck and a heron.<\/p>\n

\"HenriHenri Rousseau: Myself, Portrait-Landscape. Photograph: Mus\u00e9e de l’Orangerie\/National Gallery Prague \"HenriHenri Rousseau: Snake Charmer. Photograph: Patrice Schmidt\/Mus\u00e9e d’Orsay <\/p>\n

In the same self-portrait one could almost miss the Eiffel Tower, partially obscured by rigging on a boat, and the hot-air balloon in the clouds. \u201cThe Eiffel Tower was only a year old then, and it was still very criticised,\u201d says Degennes, the curator. \u201cDespite his naive style, Rousseau embraced a certain modernity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rousseau enthusiastically included contemporary details such as telegraph polls, dirigibles and metal bridges in his paintings. In 1908 he marked the first flight of the Wright brothers by painting a biplane overhead in a landscape. <\/p>\n

Apollinaire\u2019s poems read like Rousseau\u2019s paintings translated into words. In his landmark poem Zone, Apollinaire placed angels, figures from the Old Testament and Greek antiquity \u201cfloating around the first aeroplane\u201d.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Rousseau\u2019s Carnival Evening, the hauntingly beautiful painting of Pierrot and Columbine walking through a woodland in moonlight, is like a precursor to Apollinaire\u2019s poem and Picasso\u2019s painting, both entitled Saltimbanques. <\/p>\n

Carnival Evening was one of four paintings shown in Rousseau\u2019s initial entry at the Salon des Ind\u00e9pendants. It exudes a sense of mystery, poetry and silence, qualities found in many of his works.<\/p>\n

In the self-portrait, which belongs to the National Gallery of Prague, Rousseau wears a painter\u2019s beret and holds a paintbrush in one hand and a palette in the other. On the palette he wrote the names of his wives. His first, Cl\u00e9mence, died in 1888, probably of tuberculosis. All but one of their six children died in infancy. He married Jos\u00e9phine, a widow, in 1899. <\/p>\n

\"HenriHenri Rousseau: Carnival Evening. Photograph: Mus\u00e9e de l’Orangerie\/Philadelphia Museum of Art \"HenriHenri Rousseau: Past and Present. Photograph: Mus\u00e9e de l’Orangerie\/Barnes Foundation <\/p>\n

In Past and Present, Rousseau painted himself and Jos\u00e9phine, both middle-aged, as young people in a spring garden. He believed in spirits and added the faces of their late spouses in little clouds above their heads. \u201cBoth separated from those they loved \/ Both make new unions \/ Remaining faithful to their memory,\u201d he inscribed on the original frame.<\/p>\n

Rousseau is best known for more than two dozen large paintings of luxuriant tropical jungles inhabited by savage felines, comical monkeys and the occasional human. He knew Gauguin in the 1890s and was influenced by Gauguin\u2019s idyllic paintings of the south Pacific. Rousseau let people believe he had participated in France\u2019s 1860s expedition to Mexico, a rumour seemingly confirmed by Apollinaire in a poetic tribute cataloguing \u201cthe Aztec landscape \/ Forests of mangoes and pineapple \/ Monkeys spilling blood from watermelons \/ And the blond emperor who was shot over there\u201d.<\/p>\n

But in 1910 Rousseau told a journalist he had never left France. He studied tropical plants in the botanical gardens and wild animals in the natural history museum. <\/p>\n

\"HenriHenri Rousseau: The Lion, Being Hungry, Throws Himself on the Antelope. Photograph: Mus\u00e9e de l’Orangerie\/Robert Bayer\/Riehen\/Basel, Beyeler Collection <\/p>\n

The Lion, Being Hungry, Throws Himself on the Antelope was the largest painting completed by Rousseau, measuring just over two by three metres. Close examination reveals three other clawed creatures \u2013 a green-eyed leopard, an owl and a bird of prey \u2013 hidden in the foliage. The painting was shown at the Salon d\u2019Automne, or Autumn Salon, in 1905, alongside works by Henri Matisse and Andr\u00e9 Derain.<\/p>\n

The penultimate room of the Orangerie exhibition holds three strange canvases considered masterpieces by the curators. Their ambiguity might induce fantasy or fear. \u201cI long ago stopped trying to solve the mystery of these paintings,\u201d says Nancy Ireson, a curator at the Barnes Foundation and one of the other commissioners of the exhibition. \u201cOne just has to accept it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Bad Surprise, one of the Barnes Foundation paintings, a nude woman with knee-length hair stands in a forest at twilight. She looks heavenwards and raises her hands as if in surrender. A tiny spark and puff of smoke at the end of the barrel of the hunter\u2019s rifle indicate that he has fired at the bear. <\/p>\n

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We don\u2019t know if the animal is wounded. The hunter looks at the woman, perhaps with lust. Is she more threatened by the bear or by the hunter? The scene is at the same time comical and unsettling.<\/p>\n

In the Louvre\u2019s Snake Charmer, a black woman plays a flute in the jungle, surrounded by undulating snakes. Are the snakes under the woman\u2019s spell, or will they harm her?<\/p>\n

\"HenriHenri Rousseau: Bad Surprise. Photograph: Mus\u00e9e de l’Orangerie\/Barnes Foundation \"HenriHenri Rousseau: Sleeping Gypsy. Photograph: Mus\u00e9e de l’Orangerie\/Museum of Modern Art, New York\/Scala, Florence <\/p>\n

The Sleeping Gypsy, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is the signature painting for the exhibition. It had not been seen in Paris for 42 years. In 1897 Rousseau described the painting as featuring a wandering, mandolin-playing black woman \u201clying down with a jug of drinking water beside her, overwhelmed with fatigue and in deep sleep. A lion passes by chance, sniffs her odour and does not devour her. There is a moonlight effect, very poetic\u201d.<\/p>\n

Rousseau could barely make ends meet. He sold canvases, or swapped them for food or services, to the petty bourgeois among whom he lived. Three of his best paintings belonged to a cleaning lady, a laundry woman and a baker. Rousseau swapped a portrait of the grocer Junier and his family in their carriage for provisions. He painted many small landscapes and still-lifes because he could do them quickly and sell them cheaply to Parisians of modest means.<\/p>\n

In 1907, after Rousseau made an amateurish attempt at bank fraud, he was arrested and thrown in prison. His lawyer showed a painting of monkeys in the jungle at the artist\u2019s trial, arguing that a man who could make such a naive painting could not possibly be dishonest. Rousseau received a suspended sentence.<\/p>\n

Rousseau admired conformist artists who painted in the style known as academicism, chief among them Jean-L\u00e9on G\u00e9r\u00f4me. He repeatedly entered competitions to paint murals in the town halls of Paris suburbs, without success. He wrote pleading letters to high-ranking officials. <\/p>\n

\u201cI am waiting, now, for the good fortune of finding a rich and generous person with a noble heart who would like to make me happy by acquiring my works,\u201d he wrote to the minister for fine arts in 1884.<\/p>\n

\"HenriHenri Rousseau: Portrait of a Woman. Photograph: Adrienne Didierjean\/Mus\u00e9e National Picasso-Paris <\/p>\n

Recognition eventually came not from officialdom but from young, avant-garde writers and painters, including Apollinaire and Picasso, who like Rousseau were struggling to make a living. In 1908 Picasso purchased Rousseau\u2019s Portrait of a Woman from a junk dealer in Montmartre. Picasso called it \u201cone of the most truthful French psychological portraits\u201d and organised a banquet in his studio in the B\u00e2teau Lavoir artists\u2019 colony, in Montmartre. <\/p>\n

The banquet was attended by the US collectors Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, Picasso\u2019s fellow cubist Georges Braque, the painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay, the poet Max Jacob, Wassily Kandinsky, the first abstract painter, and his partner, Gabriele M\u00fcnter. Kandinsky bought two paintings by Rousseau and endeared him to the Blaue Reiter, or Blue Rider, artistic movement in Germany.<\/p>\n

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Rousseau was 64 years old. Picasso was 27. One can imagine the ageing painter\u2019s emotion at being so raucously feted. Apollinaire recited a long poem in his honour, ending with the stanza, \u201cWe have come together to celebrate your glory \/ These wines that Picasso pours in your honour \/ Let us drink then; it is time \/ Shouting in unison, \u2018Vive! Vive Rousseau!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1909 Ambroise Vollard, the art dealer, bought 1,000 francs worth of paintings from Rousseau, enabling him to purchase a studio in Montparnasse. But Rousseau died the following year, from a gangrenous leg injury. The hospital registry recorded that he was an alcoholic. He was buried in a pauper\u2019s grave. <\/p>\n

\"HenriHenri Rousseau: the artist in the 1900s, the final decade of his life. Photograph: Fine Art\/Heritage via Getty <\/p>\n

Eighteen months later Rousseau\u2019s young friends purchased a plot for him. Constantin Brancusi engraved Apollinaire\u2019s poem on the tombstone: \u201cWe salute you \/ Gentle Rousseau hear us \/ Delaunay, his wife, Monsieur Queval and me \/ Let our baggage pass through the gates of heaven duty free \/ We will bring you paint brushes, colours and canvas\u201d<\/p>\n

Prices fetched by Rousseau\u2019s work rose exponentially in the 1920s. Sleeping Gypsy, which had been jeered in 1897, made newspaper headlines by selling at auction for 525,000 francs in 1926, a year after the couturier Jacques Doucet willed Snake Charmer to the Louvre. In 2023 Rousseau\u2019s Flamingoes sold for $37.5 million at Christie\u2019s in New York, putting him in a league with Renoir, Picasso and Matisse.<\/p>\n

More than a century after his death, Rousseau\u2019s paintings still have the power to enchant and mystify. Christopher Green, professor emeritus at Courtauld Institute of Art, in London, and the third commissioner of the exhibition, credits Rousseau with changing the very definition of art. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe created interest in the untaught, which is still there, and very strongly \u2013 interest in something that isn\u2019t sophisticated and is obviously not establishment art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Henri Rousseau: A Painter\u2019s Ambition is at the Orangerie<\/a>, in Paris, until July 20th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Henri Rousseau gave up his day job as a low-ranking collector of tax on wine unloaded from boats…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,2226,85,46,20135,5368],"class_list":{"0":"post-399741","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-france","15":"tag-il","16":"tag-israel","17":"tag-pablo-picasso","18":"tag-paris"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}