Art
Rousseau, le Douanier
TILE most "exciting of the autumn exhibitions s6 far is that of paintings by Henri Rousseau, lc Douanier," at Messrs. Lefevrc's Gallery. I can remember only one painting by Rousseau in an English exhibition until now—a landscape in Mr. Fry's second Post-Impressionist show. In France, of course, he holds a unique and distinctive place in the history of modern painting, as the chief genuine example of " the naif." The legend of the obscure collector of octroi-duties, who had been a regimental musician, .took up painting on Sundays when he was forty, and in later years gave himself up to its practice, to be discovered and lauded by Remy de Gourmont, Apollinaire, Picasso and their friends, in itself excites curiosity and sometimes a suspicion of blague. This must be put aside ; all testify to the child-like candour of the man, and to the genuine admiration he aroused. Rousseau taught drawing in his later years, as lie taught the violin and clarinet to the children of suburban shop-keepers, and one wonders what he had to teach them—certainly not the correct proportions and deceptive realism so much admired by parents. To his pupils he probably seemed a rather inspired and aged equal. The sources of his pictorial inspiration lay very close to him, on one hand portraits of friends and the landscapes of suburban Paris in which he had moved for so long ; on the other, memories of the luxuriant beauty of tropical foliage. His army service in Mexico seems to have made an overwhelming impression on him, and he doubtless assuaged his nostalgia by his imaginative re-creation. He escaped the inhibitions of the conventionally trained painter, and his emotional life flowed the more naturally and freely into his work.
These pictures show (as no reproductions can do more than suggest) his genuine gifts, especially of colour and of expressive design. He saw local colour pure and unsullied. In the flower-piece here, a white flower is definitely white, a red one red, yellow mimosa is unbroken yellow throughout ; but instinctively they are brought into harmony.
Composition seems too ponderous a word for Rousseau's design, and suggests too much deliberation. It was surely a more intuitive choice which makes the big picture of Monkeys in the Forest so fine a decoration. The fiat, richly coloured oranges and- the stiff parallelism of trunks and branches recalls the beauty of the National Gallery Uccello, though lacking its subtlety and decision. The large paintings are less intimate and refreshing, however, than the smaller ones. Another jungle scene is made impressive and mysterious by the simplest means : a cool, sombre colour scheme, an intricate pattern of leaves against the sky, with a round moon pushing her way through a hole in the leaves", left for the purpose, and yet so well expressing the natural effect in our consciousness.
This constant invention of patterns which are characteristic and expressive as well as fascinating in themselves is certainly one of Rousseau's great talents. A chestnut leaf, or a shape of some other leaf, is taken as a unit and multiplied over a certain field, and though unnatural in scale, the result gives an astonishing sense of reality of character, though not of appear- ance. An alley of trees in an Autumn Landscape at Belle- vine in its symmetry and intensity has a kinship with the Lorenzetti. It may be said that circumstances rather than intention presented these qualities in the Douanier of a primitive at the end of the nineteenth century, but this may be the case in archaic work too. In both we appreciate the results.
Rousseau enjoyed rambling in the Louvre, but it is doubtful if he distinguished individual artists or was influenced by them. " There are so many I can't remember them," he once remarked. A little painting of a curving road, a saw-mill with a pile of timber, a line of trees and the top of the Eiffel Tower has a very tender and delicate sense of light with a lovely and personal design. It would be much easier to discover successors than forerunners for his discoveries such as this. The taste which he picked up from the pictures and decora- tions to which he was accustomed was horridly inartistic, though from it " le style concierge " has been ingeniously developed ; but his innate_ taste must have been singularly pure. Under superficial resemblances to coloured almanacks and paintings on glass there are beautiful things to be found, difficult though they may be to define. Technically he was no fumbler. He laid on his paint carefully and neatly without a trace of display but with competence, rather like a house painter.
One can imagine the refreshing miracle of grace that Rousseau's simple picture-making must have appeared in the waste of sophistication and arid accomplishment of Paris, and his more specific influence in the direction of aloofness, and painting away from the subject, for a pictorial rather than realistic end. Apart from his historical position, this exhibition offers the chance of contact with an exceptionally simple and delightful personality.
HURERT WELLINGTON.
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