Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets

Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets
The Barnes Foundation
October 19, 2025–February 22, 2026
Philadelphia

Henri Rousseau’s The Toll Gate (L’Octroi) (1890) is a modest picture, just twelve inches wide, and it depicts an unassuming setting like the one in which Rousseau worked his “day job” as a municipal customs officer, collecting taxes on goods entering Paris. The style is so simple that it seems almost child-like. Yet this little painting is surprisingly sensual—impactful on a purely affective level. You can almost feel the softness of the green lawn in the foreground like you’re walking across it barefoot. On the other side of the wrought iron fence, a tiny figure pushing a cart starts off on a little path that leads us into dense layers of trees and shrubbery that softly embrace a house, a factory, a church and promises to embrace the viewer too. A featureless customs officer in black looks out toward the viewer from the toll house, like a toy soldier, and a second similar, uniformed officer stands on the roof gazing out into the lush landscape.

L’Octroi is the first thing you see walking into the current exhibition of Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets at The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and it sets the tone. For the first time in a hundred years, the courts have finally liberated a few works a year from the stultifying installation of Dr. Barnes to collaborate with other museums, so this breathtaking exhibition is historic in that way too. Curated by two great art historians, Nancy Ireson (Chief Curator at The Barnes) and Christopher Green (Emeritus Professor at The Courtauld Institute in London), it brings together for the first time the greatest collection of Rousseau’s art in the world (The Barnes has eighteen of his paintings) with the second largest collection (11 at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris), and additional major loans from elsewhere, making this the greatest exhibition of Rousseau’s work we’re ever likely to see. It allows us to discover, probably for the first time, what a major artist this is.

In the catalogue, art historian Martha Lucy points to the sensuality in Rousseau’s painting, Unpleasant Surprise of 1901, an eroticism that we perceive almost as if by touch. Yet, with L’Octroi in 1890—right at the beginning of his career—Rousseau already defined an artistic persona that he held fast, right to the end. If the reduction in style recalls a child’s rudimentary way of rendering, or evokes a feeling of the child-like, the artist has carefully refined his style for this effect, precisely to accesses the child in all of us. He’s cultivating the simplification, the naïveté, the generalized, infantile sensuality that Freud called “polymorphously perverse”1—that is, the pre-genital child may experience sexual arousal anywhere on the body.

Rousseau’s novel way of seeing literally challenges our brains to reconfigure the terms on which we meet the world. In her classic book, How Emotions Are Made, the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman-Barrett writes: “everything you perceive around you is represented by concepts in your brain.”2 Those “concepts,” not the physical things around you in themselves, create your perception of reality. “When you look at a rainbow, you see discrete stripes of color….But in nature, a rainbow has no stripes—it’s a continuous spectrum of light, with…no borders or bands….Speech also is continuous—a stream of sound….You use concepts to categorize the continuous input….into syllables and words.”3 Images do this too.4 Rousseau’s way of constructing his own highly coherent way of seeing is still jarring for us today. It startles us into seeing freshly in response to the world around us.

A defining moment in art history which fundamentally changed the manner in which the public at large learned to see, was the historic 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris where the Fauves (Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Rouault, and friends) showed together for the first time. In it, Rousseau’s painting The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope hung in the now famous salle vii. Georges Desvallières, the vice president of the salon and a former fellow student with Matisse and Rouault in Gustave Moreau’s atelier, purposely hung the Fauve works together,5 juxtaposing this jungle scene by Rousseau and the riot of free expressionist color, with a Renaissance-style sculpted head of a child (by another Moreau alum), prompting the critic Louis Vauxcelles to wisecrack: “Well, Donatello among the Wild Beasts! (les fauves),”6 forever branding these painters as Fauves. Fauvism changed the definition of art to include this new, brilliantly colored way of representing the world and that, in turn, changed us.

The installation of Rousseau’s Hungry Lion in salle vii was more than happenstance. As a reaction to the over-cultivation and materialism of fin-de-siècle Europe, experimental artists around 1905 took an interest in tribal art from Africa and the South Pacific, child art, the art of the mentally ill, and in the work of self-taught artists; this created a receptive climate for the “naïveté” of Rousseau’s painting. But how naïve was it? At first glance people may think that a child could do it. But Rousseau is meticulous, deliberate, sophisticated in the way he radically reduced the rendering of the forms, in the studied ordinariness of the settings he chose (sometimes making extraordinary scenes seem “ordinary,” as in Unpleasant Surprise, 1901), in the way he pasted his images onto the compositions rather than in them. He didn’t have the art school training to master (or care about) accepted norms of composition, perspective, scale, and rendering, but he never lost (and did care about) the unique character of his vision. He carefully refined that appearance of “innocence” over time.

In the last room of the exhibition, the curators have lined up three of Rousseau’s greatest masterpieces, never before seen side by side (not even by the artist): the Sleeping Gypsy (1897) purportedly the favorite acquisition of Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, the Snake Charmer (1907) a star attraction in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and Unpleasant Surprise (1901) belonging to the Barnes and largely unknown because until now the Barnes has never been permitted to take anything out of the permanent installation of the founder and lend to another museum. The trio is stunning and Unpleasant Surprise holds its own as one of Rousseau’s greatest pictures.

A fresh cleaning of Unpleasant Surprise has revealed opulent colors in the sunset and its reflections in the water; it also made the lusciously painted, exaggeratedly curvaceous nude glow as if lit from within against her dark surroundings. One contemporary critic said that the bear is “going to eat up a very badly painted woman,”7 and another sarcastically remarked that the painting “has disagreeably surprised us.”8 The act of “eating” the nude (sensuously rather than naturalistically painted), and the disagreeable feeling, are visceral associations, revealing the frank revelations of the unconscious sexuality of this picture (which Renoir noted when he saw it for the first time9). The woman is not frightened, she’s anticipating an erotic “bear hug”; the hunter isn’t firing at the bear, he’s looking directly at the nude and his rifle is ejaculating. “The strange calm of Unpleasant Surprise”10 that the curators note in the catalogue brings our hidden feelings and our conscious thoughts together. It makes us whole in its embrace.

Rousseau’s Hungry Lion and his other paintings lack the color and expressive surface application of Fauvism, but its radical simplification shifts the meaning away from a comprehensible narrative and masterful representation, as Fauvism does, towards a more direct, psychological expressiveness, making it both decidedly modernist and expressionist; “fauve” after all points to the instinctuality of wild animals. We perceive Rousseau’s pictures first by the senses, bypassing the deliberately incomprehensible suggestions of story. Rousseau’s paintings cohere not from linear narrative but from instinctual juxtapositions of discrete images. They prompt our own stories rather than telling us stories and they open us to seeing things differently, through Rousseau’s “eccentric” way of seeing, and that matters.

1. Freud writes late in 1905 that in his “Three Essays…I have there shown that the constitutional sexual disposition of children is incomparably more variegated than might have been expected, that it deserves to be described as ‘polymorphously perverse’ and that what is spoken of as the normal behaviour of the sexual function emerges from this disposition after certain of its components have been repressed.” Sigmund Freud, “My Views On the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses” (1906 [1905]), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume VII, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953), 277. See also Sigmund Freud, “II, Infantile Sexuality,” in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in ibid., 191, 231-9.

2. Lisa Feldman-Barrett, How Emotions Are Made (NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 85.

3. Lisa Feldman-Barrett, How Emotions Are Made (NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 84-5.

4. My book, Modern Art at the Border of Mind and Brain (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015) concerns representation in the brain by way of images.

5. Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial – Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume I: 1863-1959 (N.Y. and London: Phaidon, 2008), 61.

6. “Tiens, Donatello au milieu des fauves,” as Henri Matisse recalled, in “Matisse Speaks,” a transcription by Tériade of a statement by Matisse from July 1951, translated in Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 132. Also cited by Pierre Courthion, Conversations avec Henri Matisse,” unpublished transcript, Getty Center for the History of Art, Santa Monica, 52; cited in Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 332.

7. Jean Béral, Art et littérature (Paris), May 10, 1901, cited in Henry Certigny, Le Douanier Rousseau en son temps: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, 2 volumes (Tokyo: Bunkazai Kenkyuiyo, 1984), 2:350; in Christopher Green, “Rousseau in the Barnes Foundation,” in Christopher Green and Nancy Ireson, Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven: Yale university Press, 2025), 250.

8. Le petit sou, April 22, 1901; cited in Henry Certigny, Le Douanier Rousseau en son temps: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, 2 volumes (Tokyo: Bunkazai Kenkyuiyo, 1984), 2:350; in Christopher Green, “Rousseau in the Barnes Foundation,” in Christopher Green and Nancy Ireson, Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven: Yale university Press, 2025), 249.

9. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, cited in Ambroise Vollard, En écoutant Cézanne, Renoir, Degas (Paris: B. Grasset, 1938), 399; in Christopher Green, “Rousseau in the Barnes Foundation,” in Christopher Green and Nancy Ireson, Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven: Yale university Press, 2025), 250.

10. Christopher Green, “Rousseau in the Barnes Foundation,” in Christopher Green and Nancy Ireson, Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven: Yale university Press, 2025), 251.