Henri Rousseau: A Painter\u2019s Secrets
The Barnes Foundation
October 19, 2025\u2013February 22, 2026
Philadelphia <\/p>\n
Henri Rousseau\u2019s\u00a0The Toll Gate (L\u2019Octroi) (1890) is a modest picture, just twelve inches wide, and it depicts an unassuming setting like the one in which Rousseau worked his \u201cday job\u201d 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\u2014impactful on a purely affective level. You can almost feel the softness of the green lawn in the foreground like you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
L\u2019Octroi is the first thing you see walking into the current exhibition of\u00a0Henri Rousseau: A Painter\u2019s Secrets\u00a0at 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\u2019s art in the world (The Barnes has eighteen of his paintings) with the second largest collection (11 at the Mus\u00e9e de l\u2019Orangerie in Paris), and additional major loans from elsewhere, making this the greatest exhibition of Rousseau\u2019s work we\u2019re ever likely to see. It allows us to discover, probably for the first time, what a major artist this is.<\/p>\n
In the catalogue, art historian Martha Lucy points to the sensuality in Rousseau\u2019s painting, Unpleasant Surprise of 1901, an eroticism that we perceive almost as if by touch. Yet, with L\u2019Octroi in 1890\u2014right at the beginning of his career\u2014Rousseau already defined an artistic persona that he held fast, right to the end. If the reduction in style recalls a child\u2019s 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\u2019s cultivating the simplification, the\u00a0na\u00efvet\u00e9, the generalized, infantile sensuality that Freud called \u201cpolymorphously perverse\u201d1\u2014that is, the pre-genital child may experience sexual arousal anywhere on the body.<\/p>\n
Rousseau\u2019s 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: \u201ceverything you perceive around you is represented by concepts in your brain.\u201d2 Those \u201cconcepts,\u201d not the physical things around you in themselves, create your perception of reality. \u201cWhen you look at a rainbow, you see discrete stripes of color….But in nature, a rainbow has no stripes\u2014it\u2019s a continuous spectrum of light, with…no borders or bands….Speech also is continuous\u2014a stream of sound….You use concepts to categorize the continuous input….into syllables and words.\u201d3 Images do this too.4\u00a0Rousseau\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019Automne in Paris where the Fauves (Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Rouault, and friends) showed together for the first time. In it, Rousseau\u2019s painting The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope hung in the now famous salle vii. Georges Desvalli\u00e8res, the vice president of the salon and a former fellow student with Matisse and Rouault in Gustave Moreau\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The installation of Rousseau\u2019s Hungry Lion in salle vii was more than happenstance. As a reaction to the over-cultivation and materialism of fin-de-si\u00e8cle 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 \u201cna\u00efvet\u00e9\u201d of Rousseau\u2019s painting. But how na\u00efve 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 \u201cordinary,\u201d as in Unpleasant Surprise, 1901), in the way he pasted his images onto the compositions rather than in them. He didn\u2019t 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 \u201cinnocence\u201d over time.<\/p>\n
In the last room of the exhibition, the curators have lined up three of Rousseau\u2019s 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 Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay 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\u2019s greatest pictures.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cgoing to eat up a very badly painted woman,\u201d7 and another sarcastically remarked that the painting \u201chas disagreeably surprised us.\u201d8 The act of \u201ceating\u201d 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\u2019s anticipating an erotic \u201cbear hug\u201d; the hunter isn\u2019t firing at the bear, he\u2019s looking directly at the nude and his rifle is ejaculating. \u201cThe strange calm of Unpleasant Surprise\u201d10\u00a0that the curators note in the catalogue brings our hidden feelings and our conscious thoughts together. It makes us whole in its embrace.<\/p>\n
Rousseau\u2019s 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; \u201cfauve\u201d after all points to the instinctuality of wild animals. We perceive Rousseau\u2019s pictures first by the senses, bypassing the deliberately incomprehensible suggestions of story. Rousseau\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201ceccentric\u201d way of seeing, and that matters.<\/p>\n
1. Freud writes late in 1905 that in his \u201cThree 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 \u2018polymorphously perverse\u2019 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.\u201d Sigmund Freud, \u201cMy Views On the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses\u201d (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, \u201cII, Infantile Sexuality,\u201d in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in ibid., 191, 231-9.<\/p>\n
2. Lisa Feldman-Barrett, How Emotions Are Made (NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 85.<\/p>\n
3. Lisa Feldman-Barrett, How Emotions Are Made (NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 84-5.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
5. Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial \u2013 Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume I: 1863-1959 (N.Y. and London: Phaidon, 2008), 61.<\/p>\n
6. “Tiens, Donatello au milieu des fauves,” as Henri Matisse recalled, in \u201cMatisse Speaks,\u201d a transcription by T\u00e9riade 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,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
7. Jean B\u00e9ral, Art et litt\u00e9rature (Paris), May 10, 1901, cited in Henry Certigny, Le Douanier Rousseau en son temps: Biographie et catalogue raisonn\u00e9, 2 volumes (Tokyo: Bunkazai Kenkyuiyo, 1984), 2:350; in Christopher Green, \u201cRousseau in the Barnes Foundation,\u201d in Christopher Green and Nancy Ireson, Henri Rousseau: A Painter\u2019s Secrets (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven: Yale university Press, 2025), 250.<\/p>\n
8. Le petit sou, April 22, 1901; cited in Henry Certigny, Le Douanier Rousseau en son temps: Biographie et catalogue raisonn\u00e9, 2 volumes (Tokyo: Bunkazai Kenkyuiyo, 1984), 2:350; in Christopher Green, \u201cRousseau in the Barnes Foundation,\u201d in Christopher Green and Nancy Ireson, Henri Rousseau: A Painter\u2019s Secrets (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven: Yale university Press, 2025), 249.<\/p>\n
9. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, cited in Ambroise Vollard, En \u00e9coutant C\u00e9zanne, Renoir, Degas (Paris: B. Grasset, 1938), 399; in Christopher Green, \u201cRousseau in the Barnes Foundation,\u201d in Christopher Green and Nancy Ireson, Henri Rousseau: A Painter\u2019s Secrets (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven: Yale university Press, 2025), 250.<\/p>\n
10. Christopher Green, \u201cRousseau in the Barnes Foundation,\u201d in Christopher Green and Nancy Ireson, Henri Rousseau: A Painter\u2019s Secrets (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven: Yale university Press, 2025), 251.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Henri Rousseau: A Painter\u2019s Secrets The Barnes FoundationOctober 19, 2025\u2013February 22, 2026Philadelphia Henri Rousseau\u2019s\u00a0The Toll Gate (L\u2019Octroi) (1890)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39259,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[6889,23849,23848,23850,19296,8090,23852,23853,23847,6033,1338,23855,5646,7865,23854,69,71,70,23851,8938,1483],"class_list":{"0":"post-39258","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-art-books","10":"tag-art-critic","11":"tag-art-reviews","12":"tag-artists","13":"tag-books","14":"tag-brooklyn-art","15":"tag-brooklyn-culture","16":"tag-contemporary-art","17":"tag-culture","18":"tag-dance","19":"tag-fiction","20":"tag-film","21":"tag-music","22":"tag-new-york-art-scene","23":"tag-philadelphia","24":"tag-philadelphia-headlines","25":"tag-philadelphia-news","26":"tag-phong-bui","27":"tag-poetry","28":"tag-theater"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}