Historians have often wondered whether strategy or something closer to luck produced the almost childishly innocent style of Henri Rousseau, a self-taught painter whose visions, once you break from their gaze, seem very adult indeed.
Such as the tall “Portrait of Madame M.” from around 1895. Small-headed, wasp waisted and bourgeois, this unidentified lady stands dwarfed by her oversize hands and swallowed up by the bouffant sleeves of her dress, in mourning black.
Rousseau models the big, flat shapes that depict her — the bulbous jewelry, the flower in one hand and parasol in the other, the stocky, stuck-on fingers that don’t quite hold either — not with outlines but with gradients, as if hinging the limbs of a paper doll.
From across the gallery in “Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets” at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, she is pursed and dignified in her perspective-less landscape. Get up close, and though she isn’t old, the contours and the shading in her face say she’s weary. Loose, wet curls lick the forehead, and she is flush.
This woman is a quiet gem among the 55 very well-chosen paintings (and one lithograph) that will acquaint any newcomer with Rousseau’s fabulist visions of modernizing France, his circuses and his sometimes Christian, sometimes pagan jungle histories.
Unlike with other big exhibits, there are no big secrets revealed, exactly — no curatorial “Rousseau and,” no archival sleuthing to find his source photos for the tigers, no pairings with the Cubists who studied him. (For those, cross the lobby to Alfred Barnes’s unrivaled collection.)
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And that’s the charm. If you are a seasoned Rousseau-head, the purity of this survey will remind you of the completeness and integrity of his universe. Here Rousseau just sort of springs from nowhere, much as he seemed to do in life.
The artist was born in 1844 in provincial Laval, France, and moved to Paris to work as a sort of custodian in a customs office. He weathered the deaths of his wife and five children by the time he retired, at 41, on a government pension to pursue his Sunday painting full-time.
In 1866 he found long-shot encouragement through acceptance to the Salon des Indépendants, the most enduring alternative to the French government’s annual exhibition of art. Despite critical belittlement even in that safe space, he showed there every year but two for the rest of his life. (When critics called out the awkward anatomy in his sitters, he simply cut them off at the ankles, burying their difficult feet. The family in his lovely wedding portrait of 1905 just levitate.)
His breakout dreamscape for that show, “Carnival Evening,” is here, starring a clown and a distant, half-painted house of real, stumping enigma. Its hundreds of needle-fine tree branches silhouetted black against a winter sky gradient foretell the day-night conjurings of Magritte. (Aside from color behavior, Rousseau knew how the eye adjusted to the absence of light.)
But at the fruitfully insular Barnes show, these paintings explain something closer to home: the amazing consistency of their maker, who shot right from the gate with a legible and obsessive idealized style that he would carry through to his last work.
The big “Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest,” from around 1910, the year he died, is one of three late jungle scenes hung in the very effective, single-wall gallery on which this show concludes. Each palmate leaf of each species of each tree is transcribed with the same sense of duty as Madame M.’s pearls. (Some can trace his vegetation back to varieties on view at Paris’s Jardin des Plantes.) The woman at center is another doll in Sunday clothes, pink this time, and ready for a stroll on the Grande Jatte. Even in the wilderness, Rousseau saw France.
And a taste for him grew privately, as viewers can see in small commissioned still lifes and Grandma Moses-like landscapes. The curators of this show — Nancy Ireson of the Barnes alongside Christopher Green of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Juliette Degennes of l’Orangerie in Paris — managed to include these pieces without diluting the weirder pictures.
“Madame M.” is not a flattering likeness, by the way. Neither is the anonymous “Portrait of a Woman” from around the same year, which a 27-year-old Picasso bought, apparently discarded, for five francs at a junk sale on the Rue des Martyrs. She is here, too. Picasso thought it “one of the most truthful of all French psychological portraits,” according to a much-quoted book on French art from 1925.
Truthful to whom? There are a good dozen portraits here. (Sadly not Rousseau’s manifesto self-portrait with the Eiffel Tower. Happily the giant landscape-consuming toddler of “Child With Doll.”) Each is so crisply defined — with the sort of early American, demonstrational attitude that Florine Stettheimer would later perfect in the United States — that you feel Rousseau derives some sort of autobiographical pleasure in committing the facts of these society Parisians to his own certainty.
In the small, almost comedic painting “Artillerymen” (circa 1893-5) a platoon poses with their cannon as if for a photograph. Each soldier has the same face and handlebar mustache. It was a Musée d’Orsay show in 2016, if I recall correctly, that suggested the face is Rousseau’s own.
He was handsome, never wanting for female companionship and arrogantly assured of his own talent. (He once offered career help to the significantly more successful Degas.) And he would owe his posterity to the young. Picasso, the writer Alfred Jarry and other Bohemians doted on him for his commitment to a vision that was by all establishment standards naïve, though some critics suspect there was element of cruelty in their attention. He was living, seasoned ammunition for fauvism, primitivism, absurdism.
But he was an acquired taste. Rousseau tried, in 1898, to sell his large desert enchantment “The Sleeping Gypsy” to his hometown, Laval, with a cover letter describing it as “very poetic.” No sale. In 1939, the Museum of Modern Art in New York scooped it up. (Alfred Barnes acquired 11 of the paintings on view.)
This gypsy reconciles you to unknowable truths, maybe even death, with simple touches like reflected light and the brief, puzzling overlap of a faceless lion. What a treat to see her here, liberated from the usual MoMA hoards and reunited with her leafier siblings. The painting’s big white moon and the pearl tuning pegs in the gypsy’s guitar bounce off the other spheres in paintings nearby: Rousseau’s beet-red suns, ripe papayas, glaring animal eyes.
Tellingly Rousseau called these “my Mexican pictures.” A more provocative show (the wall text places mercifully few demands on him or on you) might have made more of his many falsehoods. Like his self-stylization as “Le Douanier,” the “customs officer.” Or his military record: Having enlisted at age 19 in the French army to win a more lenient sentence when charged with theft, he claimed for the rest of his life that he had served in Mexico to help the French emperor in his (disastrous) attempt to install a governor there. (He did no such thing.)
I’m surprised that in our politically charged century there hasn’t been a “Rousseau and the Orientalists” — some show to pair his jungle scenes with Gérôme and other academicians who in midcentury posed their models in exoticized garb of other lands. Rousseau, less a rube than we realize, knew and adored those painters.
There is some Eugène Delacroix in the big, bloody allegory “War” (circa 1894) on loan from the d’Orsay. But this just-right show at the Barnes prefers to face you with the singular, humid beauty of the paintings alone. They reveal a painter for whom white lies and artistic license were the same, much like a child who disregards the laws of truth not to cause trouble but to stay honest to his inner life.
Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets
Through Feb. 22 at the Barnes Foundation, 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia; 215-278-7200, barnesfoundation.org.
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