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WORLDS TOP ARTISTS
For top creative practitioners, see:
Best Artists of All Time.
For the greatest view painters, see:
Best Landcape Artists.
For the greatest portraitists
see: Best Portrait Artists.
For the greatest genre-painting, see:
Best Genre Painters.
WORLD'S BEST ART
For a list of the best examples of
Fine Art Painting, by the
world's top artists, see below:
Greatest Paintings Ever
Oils, watercolours, mixed
media from 1300-present.
Oil Painting
History, styles and development.
WHAT IS ART?
For an explanation of the
aesthetic issues surrounding
the creative visual arts, see:
Art Definition, Meaning
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Biography
The French painter Henri Rousseau was born in Laval, of petty bourgeois
parents. He served in the French army (he was a clarinettist in the regimental
band at Caen) for four years. He never in fact went to Mexico or served
in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1), as he later claimed to have done.
In 1869, he settled in Paris, where he eventually obtained a post as gatekeeper
in the customs-house at the city gate (his nickname "Le Douanier",
"The Customs Officer", rather overstates his office). In 1885,
he resigned this post, took odd jobs such as painting inn-signs and devoted
more time to his own painting.
Primitivism
Entirely self-taught as an artist, Rousseau did not in fact turn to art
until relatively late in life. His first known work is Landscape With
a Watermill (1879), painted when he was 35. Although his work was
that of a primitive or "Sunday Painter", his own pretensions
were to rival the Salon favourites of the day. Ironically, however, his
work attracted the attention of the avant-garde: first Redon and Toulouse-Lautrec,
then Alfred Jarry, and finally, in his last years, Picasso and Apollinaire.
What he possessed above all was a complete confidence in the value of
his painting. He once told Picasso that they were the only great contemporary
artists, "I in the modern manner and you in the Egyptian."
Salon des Independants
His decision to devote his life to fine
art painting coincided with the founding of the Salon des Independants
in 1884. In that free, juryless exhibition, he showed between three and
ten paintings almost every year from 1886 to 1910. The majority were landscape
paintings and portraits.
His earliest known works are local views
(for instance, of the customs house), naive in their perception of reality
and in their detailed descriptiveness. But such seemingly direct reportage
was followed by inventive, imaginative, and dream-like works. However
obsessed he was with exact and particular detail, he was able to control
his composition, subordinating what might have been a host of minute and
disparate observations into a rhythmical whole. He worked slowly and carefully,
applying many layers of paint and exotic jewel-like colour, and had a
relatively small output.
The Sleeping Gypsy
One of Rousseau's best known pictures which
has become one of the most famous images of modern times, The Sleeping
Gypsy is stunning in the simplicity of it's composition and the subtlity
of its execution. The beautiful multi-coloured figure of the gypsy sleeps
peacefully, watched over by a lion, and the whole scene is bathed in the
pale light of a full moon. The picture is intensely surreal and dreamlike,
but also alarmingly direct, and real, and the image works on both levels
of interpetation. Rousseau offered it for sale to his hometown of Laval
at a price of 200 francs, but his offer was rejected as the painting was
considered "too childish".
Studio Work
Rousseau's famous jungle scenes and exotic
Landscapes were not based (as he claimed) on his mythical Mexican experiences,
but on the tropical flora and fauna that he found in books, or observed
in the Jardin des Plantes botanical gardens in Paris. Equally,
the exotic creatures inhabiting these forests - monkeys, water buffaloes,
hunters, and dark-skinned natives - were reproduced from photographs,
or from dolls and toys (for example, Merry Jesters, 1906; Philadelphia
Museum of Art). One of his last works, The Dream (1910; Museum
of Modern Art, New York) is a memory-image of his first love reclining
on a sofa in one of his imaginary jungles. Its power and conviction, its
sheer authenticity as dream-reality, foretells the best of Surrealist
painting. Kandinsky called Rousseau
the author of "new, greater reality", the complementary pole
of the "new and greater abstraction". Rousseau remains the first
and the greatest of the naive or primitive painters.
Paintings by Henri Rousseau
Works by Henri Rousseau hang in several
of the world's best art museums, including
the National Gallery London (Tiger in a Tropical Storm, 1891),
and the Museum of Modern
Art New York (The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897), and the Philadelphia
Museum of Art.
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