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Lot Essay
The landscapes that Rousseau painted of quiet, prosaic suburban vistas near Paris, which constitute by far the largest number of his pictures, form a surprising and poetic contrast to his imaginary jungle scenes. Whereas the jungles present a dense, impenetrable world in which half-hidden and mysterious conflicts roil, Rousseau's suburban landscapes are meticulously ordered and entirely open to the viewer's gaze, with diminutive figures ambling along paths, bridges, and quays under a wide sweep of sky. Unlike the Impressionists, who preferred the colorful holiday life along the Seine at Argenteuil and Bougival, Rousseau was fond of the gray, working-class neighborhoods on the immediate outskirts of Paris, which he imbued (despite their ever-present tokens of industrialization and modernity) with a sense of time suspended--"a quietude and stasis that imparts the fixity of eternal order to the banal subject matter," Carolyn Lanchner and William Rubin have written (Henri Rousseau, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 42; compare fig. 1).
Henry Certigny has proposed that the present canvas may have been exhibited at the 1896 Salon des Indépendants as Vue du canal de Charenton, soleil couchant (op. cit., p. 248). Charenton is a suburb of Paris four miles southeast of the city center, at the confluence of the Seine and the Marne; although the exact location of the present scene remains unknown, it was likely painted on the canalized section of the Marne east of the Pont de Charenton, since fishing from the quay was prohibited closer to the capital by an 1887 ordinance.
The painting has a spare, taut composition, with depth suggested by a succession of horizontal bands that extend the full width of the canvas. These frieze-like zones are punctuated by a series of rhythmic, repeated verticals (walls, windows, chimneys, and fence posts, along with a single outsized smokestack), while the bare tree branches, silhouetted with linear precision against the late afternoon sky, offer a sinuous contrast to the prevailing rectilinear structure. The scene is bracketed at the top and bottom by the turquoise of sky and water, with flat, layered planes of local color enriching the central zone. Intentional oddities of perspective and scale lend the painting an element of whimsy that checks the geometric regularity of the composition: front and side views of the houses are freely combined, for instance, and the tiny figures in the foreground (including one in the very center who observes the scene, a stand-in for Rousseau the flâneur) are dwarfed by the receding townscape. The flat, inconsistent illumination of the painting (there are no cast shadows) also contributes to its poetic resonance, or, as André Breton was to say of Rousseau's work, its "magic" (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 1984, p. 43). Lanchner has concluded, "In Rousseau's world, there is no nostalgia for a prelapsarian paradise; the Paris Sunday of petit bourgeois leisure is both the dream and the reality of a modernized Golden Age" (ibid., p. 220).
Rousseau in his studio, circa 1908. BARCODE: 28858454
(fig. 1) Henri Rousseau, La fabrique de chaises à Alfortville, circa 1897. Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris. BARCODE: 28858447
Henry Certigny has proposed that the present canvas may have been exhibited at the 1896 Salon des Indépendants as Vue du canal de Charenton, soleil couchant (op. cit., p. 248). Charenton is a suburb of Paris four miles southeast of the city center, at the confluence of the Seine and the Marne; although the exact location of the present scene remains unknown, it was likely painted on the canalized section of the Marne east of the Pont de Charenton, since fishing from the quay was prohibited closer to the capital by an 1887 ordinance.
The painting has a spare, taut composition, with depth suggested by a succession of horizontal bands that extend the full width of the canvas. These frieze-like zones are punctuated by a series of rhythmic, repeated verticals (walls, windows, chimneys, and fence posts, along with a single outsized smokestack), while the bare tree branches, silhouetted with linear precision against the late afternoon sky, offer a sinuous contrast to the prevailing rectilinear structure. The scene is bracketed at the top and bottom by the turquoise of sky and water, with flat, layered planes of local color enriching the central zone. Intentional oddities of perspective and scale lend the painting an element of whimsy that checks the geometric regularity of the composition: front and side views of the houses are freely combined, for instance, and the tiny figures in the foreground (including one in the very center who observes the scene, a stand-in for Rousseau the flâneur) are dwarfed by the receding townscape. The flat, inconsistent illumination of the painting (there are no cast shadows) also contributes to its poetic resonance, or, as André Breton was to say of Rousseau's work, its "magic" (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 1984, p. 43). Lanchner has concluded, "In Rousseau's world, there is no nostalgia for a prelapsarian paradise; the Paris Sunday of petit bourgeois leisure is both the dream and the reality of a modernized Golden Age" (ibid., p. 220).
Rousseau in his studio, circa 1908. BARCODE: 28858454
(fig. 1) Henri Rousseau, La fabrique de chaises à Alfortville, circa 1897. Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris. BARCODE: 28858447