Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets
The Barnes Foundation,
Until February 22, 2026
Being green can mean many things: eco-friendly, envious, ill, lush, and new to form. For the works of Henri Rousseau, it represents all meanings. His jungle paintings celebrate untamed nature, the ill exploration of the European voyeur, the unmet desire to travel to foreign places, and his own naïveté of being an artist without formal training. While his work was celebrated towards the end of his life, he endured open ridicule by the art establishment, which derided his works as “rough” or “childlike”. His simplicity of form, folk-like compositions, and the mythologies he often employed in his narratives attracted the praise of avant-garde artists and writers, including a young Pablo Picasso.
Henri Rousseau lived many lives. He was a soldier, a husband, a son, a widower, a musician, and finally an artist. Before leaving his profession behind to devote his life to art, he was a customs officer, which led to his nickname Le Douanier. One of his early paintings, The Toll Gate (1890), was a nod to his day job. Its composition depicts manicured lawns and trees lined up in faithful succession. In this particular exploration of French pastoral paintings, Rousseau subverts the en plein air approach by inventing much of the scene, creating an impossible landscape with overlapping forms.
In Carnival Evening (1886), the first painting to be displayed at the Salon des Independents which was created to defy the rigidity of traditional salons by accepting any and all artists, Rousseau continued with his fantastical imagery, adding two costumed figures standing arm in arm in a stark dusk light, witnessed only by a hung moon and what many people read as a mysterious face in the hut. The face was never explained, nor was the street lamp that appears upon closer inspection of the dreamlike composition.
War (1894), also titled The Ride of Discord, is destruction personified as a wild female riding a horse stretched in gallop, leaping over a heap of discarded and dismembered bodies. Scavenger birds peck at the remains while the sky begins its descent into night. This is a landscape that has no life except for the gritting exuberance of the symbol of desolation shown in tatters with a wild mane of hair that floats without wind. While Rousseau did not serve during the conflicts of his time (The French-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune of 1871), this was his response to political tumult and the human price that accompanied victories.
Still Life with Coffee Pot (1910), The Pink Candle (1908), The Cliff (1895), and The Ship in the Storm (1899) extend Rousseau’s painterly edict to simplified form from landscape to object. These smaller pieces enabled Rousseau (and other aspiring painters throughout time) to generate income by appealing to more casual art collectors who appreciate the painted form without having to derive meaning or engage in symbolism. These “bread and butter” paintings helped Rousseau develop as a painter and created an accessible price point for the younger artists who were fans of Rousseau’s work.
In 1891, Rousseau began a series of jungle paintings that would later become his most famous style of work. After a 10-year hiatus, Scouts Attacked by a Tiger (1904) marked Rousseau’s return to the jungle theme. Here, Rousseau’s signature flattened forms are layered to create depth. In the sea of blacks and greens, the artist leans on values of color and sheen to frame the scene. The influence of Japanese prints is evident here: the unblinking eye of the tiger on its prey, the linear, almost finger-like succession of vegetation, and the stark contrast of the leaves in the sky.
Tropical Forest with Monkeys (1910) shows a group of monkeys at play. As Rousseau was never able to travel to experience a real jungle to see monkeys roam, he relied on images from books and magazines and Paris’ Jardin des Plantes for inspiration. The animals he painted here have uncanny human-like characteristics as they seemingly dance across the picture plane. The Waterfall (1910) further explores the exoticization of the jungles in French colonial Africa and America. His imagined plants are visited by dark, topless figures in scant clothing, playing in the water alongside the animals.
Unpleasant Surprise (1899-1901), Snake Charmer (1907), and Sleeping Gypsy (1897), seen together for the first time in this exhibition, highlight the contrasts between how the colonizers and the colonized navigate the natural world. Surprise shows the exoticized landscapes being explored by European figures; cherubic white bodies contrasted by rich colors and simplified plant forms. The jungles, often with eyes that watch the viewer from hidden stances, represented a sort of wild freedom for the former city clerk, and the figures, native or visiting, act as proxies for his imagined encounters.
Rousseau described The Sleeping Gypsy, one of his most famous paintings, as: “A wandering Negress, a mandolin player, lies with her jar beside her (a vase with drinking water), overcome by fatigue in a deep sleep. A lion chances to pass by, picks up her scent yet does not devour her. There is a moonlight effect, very poetic.”
The indigenous characters of his paintings live alongside nature, not in defiance of it. The European figures in Surprise are almost colorless in their lush surroundings, in defense of a looming attack, and vulnerable against the elements. Charmer shows a native so in tune with nature, she controls (presumably) dangerous snakes with her music. Side by side, the two females of Surprise and Charmer are so similar in form, they could be sisters; this is most likely due to Rousseau’s lack of training, but could be interpreted as contrasting approaches to the world that surrounds them.
Henri Rousseau dips more than a toe into the idea of the exoticized other, yet he escapes the criticisms of Gauguin. While Rousseau is “childlike” and “sincere”, Gauguin is “romanticized” and “othering”, raising questions about cultural appropriation and colonial attitudes. Rousseau assembled colonial imagery that saturated French culture into dense, idealized compositions, which allowed his works to be categorized as “innocent absorption” rather than deliberate appropriation.
Emulating the style of the global south was often labeled as naive and undeveloped. European artists associated ideas of irrationality and strangeness with “primitive” artworks, which underpinned the development of early 20th-century avant-garde movements like Dada and Cubism. Some critics argue that while Rousseau drew from colonial sources, his paintings themselves don’t explicitly display a sense of colonialist superiority. Instead, the compositions imbue a sense of mystery and dreamlike ambiguity.
As an untrained painter, Rousseau had to endure critical evisceration and skepticism from the larger art players of his day. Undeterred, Rousseau collected his reviews, even the unfavorable ones, and kept his painting style simplified and enigmatic. In his refusal to compromise his artistic vision, he developed a following among younger artists, among them was Pablo Picasso, who celebrated Rousseau at a dinner held in his honor. Also in attendance were the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, the painters Georges Braque and Marie Laurencin, and the writer Gertrude Stein. After his sudden death in 1910, his artist and literary friends attended his funeral, and poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote the epitaph Brâncuși put on the tombstone:
We salute you Gentle Rousseau you can hear us.
Delaunay, his wife, Monsieur Queval and myself.
Let our luggage pass duty free through the gates of heaven.
We will bring you brushes, paints and canvas.
That you may spend your sacred leisure in the
light and Truth of Painting.
As you once did my portrait facing the stars, lion and the gypsy.
Rousseau’s paintings strike a chord with viewers by simply allowing them to bring their own interpretations to his works. His style was never didactic or preachy. It was (and is) simply enjoyable and mysterious.
“If I have preserved my näiveté, it is because M. Gerome, who was a professor at the Beaux-Arts, as well as M. Clément, Director of Beaux-Arts at the Ecole De Lyon, urged me never to lose it. The time will come when you no longer think this is strange. I’ve been told that my work is not of this century…I cannot now change my manner, which I have acquired as the result of obstinate toil.”