Henri Rousseau measured the heroes of his portraits with a folding rule. All my life I dreamed of being a realist, I was guided by the laws of academic painting, not even suspecting how much more he is.
Henri Rousseau: biography
Henri-Julien-Felix Rousseau was born on May 21, 1844 in Laval, the capital of the Mayenne department. Henri was seven years old when their house was sold at auction to pay off his father's debts. The family left Laval, but Henri was left to live at the school where he studied at the time. The boy was not a child prodigy, but he deserved an award in singing and arithmetic.
Having been released from military duty as a student of the Lyceum, he nevertheless volunteered for the army. Russo was enlisted in the 52nd Infantry Regiment in 1864. According to the War Office record, Rousseau served four and a half years and was demobilized on July 15, 1868. In 1869, Rousseau married Clemence Boitard in Paris. Seven of their nine children died in infancy.
At first, Henri served as a bailiff, but a few months later he managed to find a job at the city customs, hence his nickname - "Customs Officer". In the tax office, Rousseau was entrusted with only the most simple assignments, such as carrying out guard duty at the outposts of defensive structures. He probably started painting around 1870. The earliest canvases that have come down to us date back to 1880. In 1885, Rousseau exhibited in the free Art Salon on the Champs Elysees his copies of paintings by the old masters, made in the Louvre, and his first works - "Italian Dance" and "Sunset".
The 1886 painting "Carnival Evening" already contains the future features of Rousseau's individual style, alternation of plans, exchange of figures against the background of the landscape and careful elaboration of compositional elements. The picture aroused the ridicule of the public, but real connoisseurs. When one of his friends took Pissarro to Rousseau's canvases, thinking to amuse, he surprised his companion with the fact that he was delighted with this art, the accuracy of the valers, the richness of tones, and then he began to praise the work of the Customs official to his friends. Very soon Rousseau became a kind of celebrity, or rather, a famous eccentric.
In the Salon of Independent, Russo first exhibited in 1886. From now on, he will exhibit his works there annually, with the exception of 1899 and 1900. His naively spontaneous landscapes, views of Paris and its suburbs, genre scenes, portraits are distinguished by the conventionality of the general solution and literal precision of details, flatness of forms, bright and variegated colors.
Rousseau's wife died in 1888. In 1893 Rousseau retired. Now he was able to devote himself entirely to art. In 1895, one of the few positive responses to Rousseau's work appeared. The critic "Mercure de France" L. Roy wrote about the painting "War, or the Horsewoman of Discord", exhibited at the "independent" in 1894 "Monsieur Rousseau shared the fate of many innovators. It possesses a quality that is rare at the present time - perfect originality. He is directed towards new art. Despite a number of shortcomings, his work is very interesting and testifies to his many-sided talents."
Never again did Rousseau paint such large canvases. In 1897, the paintings "I myself, portrait-landscape" and the famous "Sleeping Gypsy" appeared. The artist was so pleased with the last work that he even offered to buy it to the mayor of Laval "I will give you the painting for an amount of 2,000 to 1,800 francs, because I would be happy if the memory of one of his sons remained in the city of Laval." The offer, of course, was rejected. In 1946, this painting entered the Louvre and was valued at 315,000 new francs.
In 1908, Rousseau exhibited four canvases at the "independent", including the painting "The Football Players". This picture is evidence that in the last years of his life the artist turned to the problems of transferring movement. Rousseau possessed not only the talent of a painter. In 1886, he was awarded an honorary diploma from the French Academy of Literature and Music for the waltz he composed, which the author performed in the Beethoven Hall. In 1889, Rousseau wrote a vaudeville in three acts and ten scenes "Attending the World Exhibition", and in 1899 creates a drama in 5 acts and 19 scenes "Revenge of the Russian Orphan." At the end of August 1910, the artist injured his leg, but did not attach any importance to this, meanwhile the wound festered and gangrene began. Rousseau died on September 2, 1910. Rousseau did not have students, but he became the founder of a new direction in art
The path to painting
The son of a tinsmith. In his youth he served in the army, where he played the saxophone; after demobilization, he entered the civil service in the Paris Customs Department (from where his nickname later arose - the Customs Officer). He began painting at the age of about forty, and after retiring in 1885 he devoted himself entirely to art, earning private lessons on the violin. Rousseau's acquaintances were ironic about his studies, but unusual bright canvases attracted the attention of famous Impressionist painters - Camille Pissarroi Paul Signac. Rousseau was invited to participate in exhibitions of the Salon of the Independents, where the color of the avant-garde-minded artistic intelligentsia of Paris gathered. Professionals from Montmartre were carried away by the “naive” world of their self-taught fellow, because Rousseau's primitivism, protest against civilization, and poetic reliability of images, which denied the academic tradition, met their need for a radical renewal of the palette, drawing, motives - the whole attitude to art. In the 1890s, Rousseau became friends with the leading poets and artists of the new era - Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger.
Artist's testament
It is believed that for the painting "The Dream" (The Dream, 1910), which is now in the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Jadwiga was also a model. This painting became one of the last works of Henri Rousseau (photo taken in the studio in 1910), and was enthusiastically received by friends and colleagues. After demonstrating it, they started talking about creating a landmark for subsequent generations in the art of surrealism.
Henri Rousseau died in September 1910. The cause of his death was gangrene, which developed after a leg injury. The artist died at the Necker hospital in Paris.
