The formal-style paintings by Da Vinci and Van Gogh are well-known to art enthusiasts. However, naive art, or works with childish simplicity, display another style. One painter who earned prominence for this style is Henri Rousseau.
Interestingly, the authors of the French Revolution and the romanticism era were both influenced by the writings of the French philosopher and Enlightenment political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau. On June 28, 1712, Jean Rousseau was born in Geneva. Even though his burning determination was to become a prominent academic artist, Rousseau eerily transitioned into a symbolic greenhorn.
Rousseau created a pattern that illustrated a dearth of formal learning. An absence of proper proportions and the use of striking, unnatural colors produced a body of work that was unusual and shrouded in mystery. For example, in one of his paintings, bananas are seen growing upside-down, while in other works, he combines species from regions that would never naturally coexist.
About Rousseau’s style
Rousseau was influenced by regular visits to the Paris gardens and is best recognized for his beautiful jungle settings. Rousseau drew inspiration for his contemporary, outlandish landscapes and portraits from various highbrow and lowbrow sources, including postcards, academic sculpture, tabloid cartoons, and visits to the Paris public zoo.
The Surrealists, who celebrated the unexpected contrasts and dreamlike quality that defined Rousseau’s work, applauded the superb, frequently outlandish symbolism that tends to result from these influences. This “primitive” style was best represented by a painting of a nude woman relaxing on a sofa that was enigmatically situated in a tropical jungle. This is one of the best Henri Rousseau paintings.
His preferred hues
Due to his low resources, world-famous painter Henri Rousseau used student-grade paint and spent a substantial amount of time creating each painting, which accounts for his small work. He worked the canvas meticulously from the top down, applying one layer of color at a time, building up different layers for each piece (the sky first, then various background components, concluding with foreground objects).
He colored from top to bottom, one at a time, starting with the blues and then on to the greens. Rousseau frequently employed more than 50 different hues of green while depicting forest scenes. His meticulous brushwork always produced a smooth finish, an example of his distinctive painting style.
Another component of his method was his employment of accurate brushstrokes, which gave each object in the image the illusion of being demarcated. Because of Rousseau’s great focus on line, chaotic juxtapositions, flattened perspective, and rigid portraiture, it’s clear that the Surrealists and Cubists heavily influenced his work.
His creativity served as the basis for his unique creations.
Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings influenced key artists even though they were scorned in the past. The true passion and highly ornamental quality of his creations aroused their curiosity. His untaught technique and feeling of innocent simplicity echoed the ‘primitivism’ favored by the early 20th century, who turned to genres like Russian folk art and African tribal masks in search of a more ‘primal’ form of expression.
Picasso purchased a Rousseau painting celebrating his brilliance after noticing it sold as a blank canvas on the sidewalk. André Breton referred to Rousseau as a “proto-Surrealist” because of his use of vibrant colors and distinctive forms and his work’s metaphysical and absurdist quality. This statement foreshadowed the creations of Surrealists like Giorgio de Chirico and Magritte.
Henri Rousseau was gifted with a delightfully enticing eccentricity that could generate mystery between the exotic and the ordinary. As a result, his paintings impacted artists of the generation after him and beyond.
A celebration of Rousseau
This vibrant, lush, light, and hot olive green evokes Rousseau’s rich magical tableaux and his deft use of bright color to grab the viewer’s attention, especially the large jungle vistas created during his career.
This former employee of the Paris Customs Service was lauded and cherished by the titans of 20th-century contemporary art and took early retirement to pursue his passion for painting.
With this soft, blended warm green that gives countless options on the canvas as green and yellow, we can see the kind of resourcefulness the artist had while doing his work. This style was useful for creating more natural hues by softening too chilly and brilliant colors, especially red violet complements.
The Tate Gallery in London recently had a significant exhibition of paintings by painter Henri Rousseau with a jungle theme, and his work is prominently displayed in prestigious institutions worldwide. Not so bad for a self-taught, so-called “naive” painter who didn’t begin to take art seriously until he turned 40.
Rousseau yearned to paint like famous Academic Salon artists of his time, Bouguereau or Gérôme. But fortunately for us, even though he socialized with artists in that environment, his distinctive viewpoint was greater than that ambition. Moreover, it appeared immune to the impressionist style emerging all around him.
Several times, Henri Rousseau’s art has been put up for auction; realized prices have ranged from $10 to $2.88 million, depending on the dimensions and medium of the piece. However, the Heureux quarter, sold at Christie’s New York in 2009, garnered the highest auction price paid for an artwork by this artist since 1998. This demonstrates the worth and brilliance of his artwork.
Conclusion
Rousseau’s colleagues and friends were crucial in preserving his legacy after his passing. With a New York show in 1910, the artist Max Weber exposed Rousseau’s artwork to American viewers. The next year, Robert Delaunay organized a tribute show at the Salon des Indépendants.
His works are still in the public sphere today and are scrutinized to a never-before-seen level. So it is understandable why innumerable admirers of the arts have praised Rousseau’s daring, transformative works, which have propelled art to historically unattainable heights.
