Henri Rousseau: jungles in Paris

The exuberant and fantastic exhibition entitled “Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris” will end its cycle in the Tate Gallery of London and then it will be moved to the Grand Palais of Paris next June 19th , and to the National Gallery of Washington next July 17th . The exhibition includes a dozen of “rainforest” paintings by “Le Douanier” Rousseau, works based only in his rich imagination, since Rousseau -contrary as other artists such as Gauguin- never left France.

ABOUT HENRI ROUSSEAU

Naïf, primitivist, sauvage . Too many adjectives to describe an indescribable artist, arguably the most original and uninhibited of all the artists emerged after the twilight of impressionism. The son of a local tinsmith, Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau was born on May 21st in Laval, France. Contrary to many other famous artists of his generation, Rousseau began painting at an advanced age, after spending seven years of his life in the Army, where he was sentenced to jail after stealing 20 francs from a lawyer’s office. This sentence was not only the beginning of Rousseau fame as a “wild” artist, but also delayed his first practices as a painter until the early 1870s, when he started to copy classic paintings in the Louvre and Versailles.

Even in his first exhibitions at the “Salón des refusés”, Rousseau caused a notorious astonishment with his primitive and colourist style, but it was in 1891 when Le Douanier caused an extraordinary shock among the critic when he exhibited the disturbing canvas entitled “¡Surprise!”, which show a ferocious, dangerous beast in the middle of a fantastic rainforest background. This was the first time that Rousseau resort to the rainforest landscapes, a theme that he successfully repeated in such famous canvas as ” The snake charmer ” (1907, Orsay), ” An American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla” (1910, Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), ” The Repast of the Lion” (1907, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and, of course, the sensational ” The dream” (1910, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), a masterwork that resumes by itself all the magic and fantasy of Rousseau’s Art.