Henri Rousseau

Paul Guillaume, Paris (by 1927)

Private Collection

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, no. 67

José Belon, La Patrie, Paris, April 23, 1911

Christian Zervos, Henry Rousseau, Les Cahiers d'Art, Paris, 1927, no. 5, illustrated

Roch Grey, Henry Rousseau, Paris, 1943, no. 60, illustrated

Lo Duca, Henri Rousseau, dit le Douanier, Paris, 1951, illustrated p. 7

Jean Bouret, Henri Rousseau, Neuchâtel, 1961, no. 113, illustrated p. 201

Dora Vallier, Henri Rousseau, Paris, Cologne, 1961, illustrated pl. 107 (as dating from 1906)

Dora Vallier, L'Opera Completa di Rousseau il Doganiere, Milan, 1969, no. 191, illustrated p. 105

Henry Certigny, Le douanier Rousseau en son temps, Biographie et catalogue raisonné, vol. 1, Tokyo, 1984, no. 163, illustrated p. 335

Very good condition over all. The canvas is lined. There are some very fine lines of craquelure most notably within the dark green pigments of the trees, but these are entirely stable and not visually distracting. Under UV light, there are tiny scattered retouchings, the most notable of which are within the central part of the sky, within the building on the left of the composition, within the left hand pavement and to the extreme right of the garden wall on the right of the composition
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Rousseau’s vision of Parisian suburbia is permeated with an air of mystery. Vue des environs de Paris possesses a hypnotic perspective that reaches into the distance and is enforced by the rhythmic progressions of window to window, fence to fence on either side of the street. The artist’s unconventional approach led him to be regarded as a highly innovative painter whose work was admired by artists such as Picasso and Robert Delaunay, as well as the Surrealists. Götz Adriani writes, “Painting helped him to step out of an almost unseen existence, to make the inconspicuous worth seeing and to obtain the remote from the familiar. As an artist, he was able to convert the everyday into the unusual, to bring fantasy and extreme precision together in a dialectic tension” (G. Adriani, Henri Rousseau (exhibition catalogue), Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen, 2001, p. 14).

Vue des environs de Paris is significant within the artist’s œuvre because of its evocative rendering of the weather.  A solitary figure beneath an umbrella is an eloquent device that highlights the ominous storm clouds rising above the smoking chimney stacks. The  leaves and branches seem to shiver under the falling rain and sway in the wind. The critic Gustave Coquiot wrote that Rosseau had “such style, such inventiveness, such a rare deployment of qualities; and above all he offers such a love, such personal generosity, such a gift of his naked heart, such absence of falsehood, of insincerity, that we can rightly speak of Rousseau’s contribution to painting as both generous and unique” (quoted in Henri Rousseau (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 37).