"You and I,” Henri Rousseau proclaimed to Pablo Picasso, at a party the great painter held in his honor, “are the two most important artists of the age - you in the Egyptian style, and I in the modern one.” In the decades that followed, Picasso would recount the quote with a laugh, betraying the cynical circumstances surrounding “Le Banquet Rousseau.”
It was, by all accounts, one hell of a party. As is often the case with such historic events, however, there are as many divergent accounts as there were guests: an illustrious list that included the likes of Gertrude Stein and Jean Metzinger. Artist Robert Delaunay, however, refused an invitation, convinced that it amounted to little more than a mockery of the self-taught guest of honor.
It was a sentiment later echoed by Stein, who would recount the story of shepherding the 64-year-old painter home, after he passed out from drinking. Rousseau — believed by many of the artists in attendance to be too simple to understand that the evening was a joke at his expense — would write his host a heartfelt letter of thanks. He played violin for his fellow diners and rejoiced when the poet Guillaume Apollinaire recited a freshly-penned work scrawled on a napkin,
You recall, Rousseau, the Aztec landscape
the forests where mango and pineapple grow.
Where monkeys spill red blood of the pastecos
And the fair-haired Emperor was harried and slain?
The pictures that you painted you captured in Mexico-
Red sun and green banana leaves
Hereafter the brave soldier’s uniform, Rousseau’s
You changed for the Douanier’s upright blue.
The piece, like the event itself, was meant to poke fun at the artist. Rousseau had, in his youth, joined the military to avoid scandal pertaining to a charge of petty larceny, but ultimately never saw combat. In fact, he famously never left France, in spite of setting many of his most famous works deep in jungle foliage. “When I step into the hothouses and see the plants from exotic lands,” he wrote of his experiences, “it seems to me that I am in a dream.”
The Rousseau work that watched over the banquet, however, was far more understated than pieces like “The Snake Charmer” and “The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope.” The subject of “Portrait of a Woman” is stoic in a lace collar, clutching a tree branch in one hand and a sagging flower in the other. Picasso purchased the work for five francs in 1907 and kept it in his possession until his death 65 years later.
It’s clear that Picasso’s appreciation for the most famous and influential exemplar of naïve art was far deeper than his mocking banquet let on. The Spanish painter first encountered Rousseau’s work at a junk shop in Paris, shortly after relocating to the city in his late 20s. The piece was being sold as a canvas to be painted over. After acquiring “Portrait of a Woman” several years later, Picasso would purchase two additional Rousseaus from Delaunay.
It’s not entirely clear why Rousseau picked up painting his in 40s. Boredom seems the most plausible explanation. He did, after all, have an extraordinary amount of downtime to draw during his job as a toll collector. It was that work that earned him the disparaging nickname “Le Douanier” (the customs officer) among the Paris artistic set, in spite of the fact that he was never actually promoted to so high a role.
At 49, Rousseau used his small pension to retire, in order to pursue painting full-time. The painter contributed “Carnival Evening” to the first Salon des Indépendant in 1886. The striking work — which features a pair of figures in carnival outfits set against a haunting, dreamlike forrest of bare branches — led one critic to write, “Monsieur Rousseau paints with his feet, with a blindfold over his eyes.” In response to his paintings, another declared that, “backs jostle in front of his entries, and the place rocks with laughter.” Undeterred, Rousseau would submit to the annual exhibition in all but two years leading up to his 1910 death.
At the 1889 exhibit, one particularly callous critic wrote that he had “never seen anything more grotesque” in reference to two works: a Rousseau portrait and a painting by a Dutch artist titled, “The Starry Night.”
Sources:
How Henri Rousseau Became the Untrained Master of Surreal Jungle-Inspired Paintings https://mymodernmet.com/henri-rousseau-paintings/
Henri Rousseau https://www.biography.com/artist/henri-rousseau
Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris: Artistic circle: Pablo Picasso https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/henri-rousseau-jungles-paris/henri-rousseau-jungles-paris-artistic-0
Henri Rousseau https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/henri-rousseau
When Henri met Pablo https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/oct/29/art