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拍品专文
Painted circa 1905, Femme en rouge dans la fôret is a captivating example of the fantastic, alluring visions of Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau. Amid the dense, towering foliage of a mysterious, otherworldly landscape, a fashionable woman clutching a parasol promenades, her elegant attire at odds with the wild display of nature surrounding her. Rendered in Rousseau’s idiosyncratic style, the painting offers an intriguing combination of the artist’s famed jungle pictures with his meticulous depictions of Paris and its denizens, conjuring an uncanny, dreamlike atmosphere that would prove highly influential for generations of younger artists who discovered his work during the opening decades of the twentieth century.
Described by Douglas Cooper as “a personality as unique and unclassifiable as any that can be found in the history of art,” Rousseau came to his painterly vocation late in life (“Henri Rousseau: Artiste-Peintre” in The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, July 1944, vol. 85, no. 496, p. 160). For much of his professional career, he worked for the Parisian customs service known as the Octroi, a position that would later earn him the sobriquet “Le Douanier” (the customs officer) among his peers, though in reality he was a gabelou, a toll collector who spent his days monitoring the passage of goods through the city gates. It was only as he approached the age of 40 that Rousseau appears to have made the momentous decision to pursue his passion for art, and in 1884 he secured a copyist’s permit, granting him free entrance to the museums of Paris to study the works of the great masters first-hand.
Entirely self-taught, Rousseau devoted his evenings and Sundays to painting, later writing in a short auto-biographical note that he worked “alone and without any master but nature and some advice from Gérôme and Clément” (quoted in D. Vallier, op. cit., 1979, p. 7). Boldly breaking away from the established rules of academic, mimetic art and embracing a highly personal painterly idiom, Rousseau forged a new path for artistic freedom. At the age of 49 he took early retirement from the Octroi in order to devote himself full-time to his art. Living in a simple apartment in Plaisance, which doubled as a studio, he worked odd jobs to supplement his modest pension, giving lessons in music and art to children from the neighborhood. While he worked in a traditional vein, covering all of the classical genres, Rousseau’s unique vision set him apart from his contemporaries. His single-mindedness and confidence in his own abilities led him to be considered an eccentric figure within the Parisian art world—in 1895, he proclaimed without irony that he was “in the process of becoming one of our best realist painters,” and seemed oblivious to the disparaging remarks aimed at his works when they were shown at public exhibition (quoted in ibid., p. 7).
The depiction of various characters meandering through a dense woodland or forest setting had been a recurring motif within Rousseau’s oeuvre from the earliest stages his painterly career. Un soir de carnaval (Vallier, no. 6; 1886, Philadelphia Museum of Art), his first submission to the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1886, centered on two costumed performers walking through a wintry, twilit forest, the moon above casting little light on the ever-darkening scene. Similarly, Rendez-vous dans la forêt (Vallier, no. 21; circa 1889, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) depicted a couple dressed in historical costume as they make their way through a screen of trees on horseback, while in La promenade dans la forêt (Vallier, no. 23; 1889, Kunsthaus Zürich) Rousseau focused his attention on a lone woman in contemporary dress walking along a clearly demarcated path in the middle of a forest, her figure half-turned to look behind her, as if she has been surprised by a noise or the arrival of another character, just out of frame. In Femme en rouge dans la fôret and its sister painting, Femme se promenant dans une forêt exotique (Vallier, no. 174; circa 1905, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia), Rousseau returned to the theme, transporting his protagonists to a vivid landscape bursting with plant-life, in which their forms are dwarfed by the sheer abundance and size of the surrounding foliage.
Contrary to the proclamations of some of his contemporaries, and indeed some of his own statements, Rousseau never ventured beyond the borders of France. Instead, his lush, tropical scenes were inspired by popular culture, and drew on motifs from postcards, illustrated journals, dime store novels, encyclopedias, botanical treatises and printed ephemera for inspiration. As Frances Morris has noted, “Rousseau’s jungle paintings were dreamscapes, each one the meeting place of a principal idea with a tapestry of images culled from everyday, local sources and experiences, all of which were available to the ordinary people of Paris” (“Jungles in Paris” in F. Morris and C. Green, eds., Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2005, p. 20). Rousseau compiled a large collection of cuttings from the illustrated press over the years, keeping images that had caught his eye from both real stories of far-off lands and the fictional serialized tales that captivated French audiences, using a pantograph to enlarge these illustrations and translate them onto his canvases.
He supplemented this personal library of reference images with visits to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where he studied and sketched the tropical plants in the vast glasshouses of the botanical gardens. These experiences were key to conjuring the famed tropical forests that defined Rousseau’s mature career and cemented his place within the history of art, each canvas brimming with riotous combinations of flora and fauna. However, while Rousseau’s visions of exotic plant-life were rooted in reality, he did not pay attention to the size nor detailing of the specimens as depicted in their original source material, nor the context in which he found them in the botanical gardens. Instead he simplified their forms, granting them a flat, graphic quality, and allowed different plants to combine in unexpected groupings, solely for the purpose of delighting the eye. Such heightened stylization was entirely intentional on Rousseau’s part, as he attempted to convey his own personal feelings when immersed in these extraordinarily rich environments—as he explained, “…when I walk into these greenhouses and see these strange plants from exotic countries, it seems to me that I am entering a dream” (quoted in Y. le Pichon, Le Monde du Douanier Rousseau, Paris, 1985, p. 132).
It is this mood that Rousseau powerfully evokes in Femme en rouge dans la fôret, where enormous fronds of grass and giant leaves of varying shapes and textures tower over the solitary figure at the heart of the composition. Though the woman does not seem surprised by the lush setting for her walk, her refined, fashionable outfit—replete with elaborate hat, full skirt and silk gloves—suggests she is not an intrepid adventurer, wandering through a distant jungle, but rather a typical Parisian dressed for a stroll through a manicured park or the carefully cultivated world of the hothouses. While Henry Certigny has suggested that the female protagonist was in fact a portrait of Madame Marie Isard, a neighbor of Rousseau’s from this period, the artist does not attempt to record a particular likeness in Femme en rouge dans la fôret, preferring to portray a more generalized Parisienne. Instead, the closest parallels for the female figure appears to have been contemporary fashion plates, which chronicled and promoted shifting trends in clothing among French society.
Several of Rousseau’s artistic contemporaries had been similarly fascinated by these illustrations, including Paul Cezanne and Georges Seurat, who made numerous revisions to the size of the bustle of one of the principal characters in his famed Un dimanche après-midi à l'Ile de la Grande Jatte, adjusting the woman’s silhouette as he worked in order to match the growing taste for larger and more elaborate skirts. Rousseau, however, was once again, out-of-step with the times—while the large gigot or puffed sleeves of the woman’s crimson dress experienced a resurgence in popularity during the mid-1890s, they had already fallen out of fashion by the turn of the century, and so would have been an outmoded style during the time in which the artist was working on Femme en rouge dans la fôret. For Rousseau, though, the goal of his paintings was never a precision of detail—through this multi-layered process of absorption, copying and translation, his compositions became rich assemblages, in which a profound, essential sense of mystery was revealed to the viewer.
It was likely the verdant vegetation and dream-like setting of Femme en rouge dans la fôret that initially appealed to Mary Elizabeth and Henry D. Sharpe, who acquired the painting circa 1939. Born in 1885 in Syracuse, Mary Elizabeth Evans was an innovative entrepreneur, philanthropist, author, environmentalist, and self-taught landscape architect. At the age of just 15, she began selling homemade candy to help her family financially, and her eponymous business quickly took off, leading her to establish a series of stores around the country, as well as two successful tea rooms. During the First World War she joined the Red Cross and travelled to France, running a kitchen for American soldiers, and it was here that she fell in love with French architecture and art. Following the end of the war, she married Henry D. Sharpe, and the couple moved to Providence, Rhode Island, near the Sharpe family’s manufacturing business, building the elegant Rochambeau House.
In the mid-1930s Mary Elizabeth sold her business and refocused her attention on her dual passions of culture and gardening. Fascinated by landscape design, she transformed the Brown University campus during her time as a volunteer horticulturist, and was an instrumental figure in the development of several parks and green spaces around Providence. Her interest in art also grew, leading her to develop a reputation as an important patron and supporter of cultural initiatives. She befriended the multi-disciplinary artist Florence Koehler, who helped Sharpe build an important and varied collection of fine and decorative arts over the years, the star centerpiece of which was Rousseau’s Femme en rouge dans la fôret. The painting stayed with the Sharpes until the early 1950s, and was subsequently purchased by the present owners in 1974, with whom it has remained for the past fifty years.
Described by Douglas Cooper as “a personality as unique and unclassifiable as any that can be found in the history of art,” Rousseau came to his painterly vocation late in life (“Henri Rousseau: Artiste-Peintre” in The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, July 1944, vol. 85, no. 496, p. 160). For much of his professional career, he worked for the Parisian customs service known as the Octroi, a position that would later earn him the sobriquet “Le Douanier” (the customs officer) among his peers, though in reality he was a gabelou, a toll collector who spent his days monitoring the passage of goods through the city gates. It was only as he approached the age of 40 that Rousseau appears to have made the momentous decision to pursue his passion for art, and in 1884 he secured a copyist’s permit, granting him free entrance to the museums of Paris to study the works of the great masters first-hand.
Entirely self-taught, Rousseau devoted his evenings and Sundays to painting, later writing in a short auto-biographical note that he worked “alone and without any master but nature and some advice from Gérôme and Clément” (quoted in D. Vallier, op. cit., 1979, p. 7). Boldly breaking away from the established rules of academic, mimetic art and embracing a highly personal painterly idiom, Rousseau forged a new path for artistic freedom. At the age of 49 he took early retirement from the Octroi in order to devote himself full-time to his art. Living in a simple apartment in Plaisance, which doubled as a studio, he worked odd jobs to supplement his modest pension, giving lessons in music and art to children from the neighborhood. While he worked in a traditional vein, covering all of the classical genres, Rousseau’s unique vision set him apart from his contemporaries. His single-mindedness and confidence in his own abilities led him to be considered an eccentric figure within the Parisian art world—in 1895, he proclaimed without irony that he was “in the process of becoming one of our best realist painters,” and seemed oblivious to the disparaging remarks aimed at his works when they were shown at public exhibition (quoted in ibid., p. 7).
The depiction of various characters meandering through a dense woodland or forest setting had been a recurring motif within Rousseau’s oeuvre from the earliest stages his painterly career. Un soir de carnaval (Vallier, no. 6; 1886, Philadelphia Museum of Art), his first submission to the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1886, centered on two costumed performers walking through a wintry, twilit forest, the moon above casting little light on the ever-darkening scene. Similarly, Rendez-vous dans la forêt (Vallier, no. 21; circa 1889, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) depicted a couple dressed in historical costume as they make their way through a screen of trees on horseback, while in La promenade dans la forêt (Vallier, no. 23; 1889, Kunsthaus Zürich) Rousseau focused his attention on a lone woman in contemporary dress walking along a clearly demarcated path in the middle of a forest, her figure half-turned to look behind her, as if she has been surprised by a noise or the arrival of another character, just out of frame. In Femme en rouge dans la fôret and its sister painting, Femme se promenant dans une forêt exotique (Vallier, no. 174; circa 1905, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia), Rousseau returned to the theme, transporting his protagonists to a vivid landscape bursting with plant-life, in which their forms are dwarfed by the sheer abundance and size of the surrounding foliage.
Contrary to the proclamations of some of his contemporaries, and indeed some of his own statements, Rousseau never ventured beyond the borders of France. Instead, his lush, tropical scenes were inspired by popular culture, and drew on motifs from postcards, illustrated journals, dime store novels, encyclopedias, botanical treatises and printed ephemera for inspiration. As Frances Morris has noted, “Rousseau’s jungle paintings were dreamscapes, each one the meeting place of a principal idea with a tapestry of images culled from everyday, local sources and experiences, all of which were available to the ordinary people of Paris” (“Jungles in Paris” in F. Morris and C. Green, eds., Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2005, p. 20). Rousseau compiled a large collection of cuttings from the illustrated press over the years, keeping images that had caught his eye from both real stories of far-off lands and the fictional serialized tales that captivated French audiences, using a pantograph to enlarge these illustrations and translate them onto his canvases.
He supplemented this personal library of reference images with visits to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where he studied and sketched the tropical plants in the vast glasshouses of the botanical gardens. These experiences were key to conjuring the famed tropical forests that defined Rousseau’s mature career and cemented his place within the history of art, each canvas brimming with riotous combinations of flora and fauna. However, while Rousseau’s visions of exotic plant-life were rooted in reality, he did not pay attention to the size nor detailing of the specimens as depicted in their original source material, nor the context in which he found them in the botanical gardens. Instead he simplified their forms, granting them a flat, graphic quality, and allowed different plants to combine in unexpected groupings, solely for the purpose of delighting the eye. Such heightened stylization was entirely intentional on Rousseau’s part, as he attempted to convey his own personal feelings when immersed in these extraordinarily rich environments—as he explained, “…when I walk into these greenhouses and see these strange plants from exotic countries, it seems to me that I am entering a dream” (quoted in Y. le Pichon, Le Monde du Douanier Rousseau, Paris, 1985, p. 132).
It is this mood that Rousseau powerfully evokes in Femme en rouge dans la fôret, where enormous fronds of grass and giant leaves of varying shapes and textures tower over the solitary figure at the heart of the composition. Though the woman does not seem surprised by the lush setting for her walk, her refined, fashionable outfit—replete with elaborate hat, full skirt and silk gloves—suggests she is not an intrepid adventurer, wandering through a distant jungle, but rather a typical Parisian dressed for a stroll through a manicured park or the carefully cultivated world of the hothouses. While Henry Certigny has suggested that the female protagonist was in fact a portrait of Madame Marie Isard, a neighbor of Rousseau’s from this period, the artist does not attempt to record a particular likeness in Femme en rouge dans la fôret, preferring to portray a more generalized Parisienne. Instead, the closest parallels for the female figure appears to have been contemporary fashion plates, which chronicled and promoted shifting trends in clothing among French society.
Several of Rousseau’s artistic contemporaries had been similarly fascinated by these illustrations, including Paul Cezanne and Georges Seurat, who made numerous revisions to the size of the bustle of one of the principal characters in his famed Un dimanche après-midi à l'Ile de la Grande Jatte, adjusting the woman’s silhouette as he worked in order to match the growing taste for larger and more elaborate skirts. Rousseau, however, was once again, out-of-step with the times—while the large gigot or puffed sleeves of the woman’s crimson dress experienced a resurgence in popularity during the mid-1890s, they had already fallen out of fashion by the turn of the century, and so would have been an outmoded style during the time in which the artist was working on Femme en rouge dans la fôret. For Rousseau, though, the goal of his paintings was never a precision of detail—through this multi-layered process of absorption, copying and translation, his compositions became rich assemblages, in which a profound, essential sense of mystery was revealed to the viewer.
It was likely the verdant vegetation and dream-like setting of Femme en rouge dans la fôret that initially appealed to Mary Elizabeth and Henry D. Sharpe, who acquired the painting circa 1939. Born in 1885 in Syracuse, Mary Elizabeth Evans was an innovative entrepreneur, philanthropist, author, environmentalist, and self-taught landscape architect. At the age of just 15, she began selling homemade candy to help her family financially, and her eponymous business quickly took off, leading her to establish a series of stores around the country, as well as two successful tea rooms. During the First World War she joined the Red Cross and travelled to France, running a kitchen for American soldiers, and it was here that she fell in love with French architecture and art. Following the end of the war, she married Henry D. Sharpe, and the couple moved to Providence, Rhode Island, near the Sharpe family’s manufacturing business, building the elegant Rochambeau House.
In the mid-1930s Mary Elizabeth sold her business and refocused her attention on her dual passions of culture and gardening. Fascinated by landscape design, she transformed the Brown University campus during her time as a volunteer horticulturist, and was an instrumental figure in the development of several parks and green spaces around Providence. Her interest in art also grew, leading her to develop a reputation as an important patron and supporter of cultural initiatives. She befriended the multi-disciplinary artist Florence Koehler, who helped Sharpe build an important and varied collection of fine and decorative arts over the years, the star centerpiece of which was Rousseau’s Femme en rouge dans la fôret. The painting stayed with the Sharpes until the early 1950s, and was subsequently purchased by the present owners in 1974, with whom it has remained for the past fifty years.