Henri Rousseau: The Painter of Modern Life

Henri Rousseau: The Painter of Modern Life

Henri Rousseau’s personal life journey of becoming an artist was as transformative and inspiring as that of the modernization of Paris during his lifetime. In many ways his life and artwork epitomized the experience of modernity in Paris for the working class. Rousseau’s body of work comprised of two main themes, Parisian landscapes and exotic jungle scenes, which altogether portrayed the inner dichotomy felt by individuals during modernity. Marshall Berman, in describing the experience of modernity wrote, “At the same time, the nineteenth century modern public can remember what it is like to live, materially and spiritually, in worlds that are not modern at all. From this inner dichotomy, this sense of living in two worlds simultaneously, the ideas of modernization and modernism emerge and unfold” (17).

In the nineteenth century, Paris would become the city of modernity. “The Second Empire, under the leadership of Napoleon III, began a program of urban renewal and transformations directed by the Prefect of Seine, Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann. This program became known as Haussmannism”, after the Third Republic execrated the name of Bonarparte (Jones 300). It became a continuing influence on the remodeling of the capital even after the fall of the Second Empire in 1870.

Rousseau, having moved to Paris In1968, experienced the effects of Haussmanization on the city and witness the fall of the Second Empire and the rise of the Third Republic. Walter Benjamin claimed that Haussmann’s transformation of the familiar environment into something new and strange meant that “Parisian’s …. no longer felt at home in it”(Jones 289). The intermingling of art and reality, illusion and truth, individual desire and collective fantasy, in everything relating to the spectacular representation of Paris, was increasingly intense as the nineteenth century wore on, and it was encapsulated in Rousseau’s artwork.

In the 1863 essay The Painter of Modern Life by poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire, there is a strong correlation between Baudelaire’s description of an exemplary painter of modern life, Constantin Guys and that of Henri Rousseau. The main difference being that of social class- Guys most likely had a Bourgeois background whereas Rousseau was a member of the petit bourgeoisie.

Guys was an old soldier who had served in the freedom of Greece. Rousseau was a soldier as well however he never left France, contrary to the myth perpetuated by himself and his friends such as Apollinaire, Salmon and Jarry. The fictional story surrounding Rousseau was that he served in Mexico as a soldier with Napoleon III expeditionary force against the Emperor Maximilian in 1860’s, an experience which would later inspire his jungle pictures. The truth was that he was discharged from the army after his father’s death in order to take care of his mother. He then settled in Paris in 1868. His interview in 1910 confirmed that his voyages had gone no further that Jardin des Plantes (Morris 111).

Rousseau re-enlisted briefly during the Franco Prussian wars in 1870 but did not see any action. The siege of Paris in 1870, however, did inspire his first attempt at allegorical painting, War 1894. The personification of war here is a terrifying woman on horseback, with bared teeth and wild hair, rides on horseback across a barren landscape littered with corpses. The plethora of broken forms and above all the choice of colors all play a role: the green of hope is completely absent; black and red dominate. The colors of mourning and blood, which, along with the white garment of the grotesque figure, are also the colors of the flag of German Empire, the hereditary enemy (Shattuck 120).

Baudelaire saw Guys as a Bohemian hero, an outsider, the “observer, philosopher, flaneur” and as “the painter of the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity it contains”. Like Baudelaire, he, a “man of the crowd,” was a journalist who was trained to watch and look carefully, especially at the details, or what the poet described as, “particular beauty, the beauty of circumstances and the sketch of manners”( Baudelaire 20). The role of the flaneur, the sentient ambler around the streets of the post-Revolutionary, modern city, played a significant role in perceptions of Paris. The flaneur was the individual immersed in the crowd, but not of it. “For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, noted Baudelaire, ‘it is an immense joy to set up home in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive.’ The Flaneur’s anonymity allowed him to witness the pulsating street life of the expanding city, and he diffused his perceptions and sensations in novels, newspaper articles, literary guidebooks and urban physiologies- which in their diverse ways assisted the literary myths of Paris (Jones 278).

Rousseau was naturally a flaneur, a passionate spectator. His Parisian landscapes allows the viewer to trace his journeys around and about Paris. Limited by his working class status, he had little experience of the exclusive sophistication that the city had to offer. Rousseau’s artwork, however presented a different perspective. Wilhelm Uhde stated “Rousseau knew nothing of the splendor of the marvelous Paris we love.” His subject became “human documents, studies of the states of the soul” (Alley 17).

In The Quarry 1896-7 Rousseau identifiably put himself in the picture as an observer of nature and the urban scene, a modest statement describing Rousseau the flaneur. The landscape expresses the prevailing harmony between man and nature and man’s use of nature (Shattuck 76).

Nancy Forgione, points out that walking became a frequent pictorial theme in Parisian Art of the second half of the 19th century. Images by certain modernist painters, who themselves strolled the cities like flaneurs, reflect an intuitive awareness of the heightened role walking played in mediating the relation between self and world, in the wake of Haussmanization. The paintings impart a variety of experiences that express the positive as well as the negative dimension of urban street life.

After serving during the Seige of Paris, he obtained a post in the Octroi service of Paris. At each of the city gates of Paris, a small pavilion housed three or four officials who checked the contents of carriages entering the capital. This was the occupation from which arose Rousseau’s misleading nickname ‘le Douanier’ (customs officer) (Alley 8). He would stay with the octroi until 1893 when he could start drawing a small pension, at which time he retired to devote himself to his art. He had started painting as an amateur in the early 1880’s and had his first exhibit around 1886.

The Customs Post 1890 is the only known example where the Octroi features. According to Uhde the artist never missed an opportunity to sketch when he was at work. Rousseau saw his careers as “complimentary and considered work and leisure to overlap” (Alley 5). A renaissance man of sorts and true lover of the arts, Rousseau was also a musician, a playwright and poet. Later in life he gave lessons both in painting and in playing the violin to make extra money.

Baudelaire compared the artistic condition of Guys to be that of childhood. As described by Baudelaire, Guys drew like a “barbarian, or a child,” producing “primitive scribbles.” “but genius is nothing more not less than childhood recovered at will….”(Baudelaire 15). Rousseau, being self- taught, never attained technical standards of the academies such as knowledge of anatomy or linear perspective, and as a result his work had the affinity with the art of children. He like most of the other naïve painters all came to paint later in life, painting in the spare time through a genuine urge for self- expression. Rousseau was the first artist to attract attention as a so called ‘modern primitive’.

Baudelaire, used the term ‘modernite’ to articulate a sense of difference from the past and to describe a peculiarly modern identity. Applying it to art Baudelaire defined it in this way: “by ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable” (Baudelaire 5). These two aspects – the transitory or fleeting, on the one hand, and the eternal on the other – were two sides of a duality. There was a mutual dependence and a productive tension between them. Henri Rousseau’s body of work reflected this duality in many ways- the Parisian landscapes often depicted areas where rural and urban elements met, he combined both portraiture and landscape genres, he made the familiar seem strange, offered images of war and peace, and portrayed the exotic as peaceful in some scenes and dangerous in others.

The dual imagery of the rural meeting the urban environment is abundant in Rousseau’s Parisian landscapes. Born in the rural French town of Laval, in 1844, Rousseau belonged to an upper middle class family. He moved to Paris in 1868, the only modern city in France at the time. Nancy Ireson states that the way in which the country and the city seem to meet in some of the landscapes, such as The Banks of the Bievre near Bicetre of 1908 was informed by that collective experience of moving from rural to an urban metropolis ( 21). Rousseau was attracted to and depicted regions that were marginal outlying districts away from the grand boulevards. Where town and country meet, where trees coexist with more modern intrusions from the industrializing world such as electricity power lines and chimneys, places intersected by canals and crossing places of rivers as well as places of rest, the parks and gardens of the city (Morris 18).

Art historian TJ Clarke in “The Painting of Modern life” argues that “the environs of paris from the 1880’s on were recognized to be a special territory in which some aspects of modernity might be detected…..Where industry and recreation were casually established next to each other, in a landscape which assumed only as much form as the juxtaposition of production and distraction allowed, there modernity seemed vivid, and painters believed they might invent a new set of descriptions for it”(147).

In Saw Mill, Outskirts of Paris 1893 Rousseau depicts a timber cutting factory set in a rolling landscape. Read literally it suggest that post war France is prospering, given the vast piles of treated logs. To paint such an unusual subject can be seen as very modern, and he presents modernity as unremarkable, as part of the natural order. The fact that the building blends in with its surroundings, that its presence does not disturb the promenading mother and child, makes the factory an acceptable part of the landscape (Ireson 35).

Rousseau did not paint Paris as it was, as a city that was undergoing great changes, including the construction of the metro and the department stores. Perhaps because the petite bourgeoisie was fuelling those changes, for their relaxation, Rousseau presented them with scenes that were infinitely more sedate, such as his View of the Fortifications 1896. After a hard days labor, it was here, according to Uhde, that the “shop workers and tradesmen headed ‘to see a freer, fuller sky.’ The strange leaps in perspective and the uneasy relationship between ground and figures reflects the fact that these images were dislocated from the actual look of the city” (Ireson 35). Contemporary photographs show that he seldom presented his chosen locations with topographic accuracy. The Parisian landscapes were usually altered in the studio, or corralled from different sources. His landscapes, in terms of Baudelaire can be seen as “the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable”. He meant for his Parisians landscape to appeal to the people of the city, the petit-bourgeoisie in particular, who like him were struggling to adapt to the changing environment.

The essay“The Metropolis and Mental Life" by Georg Simmel discusses the individual's position in the big city urban life and his/her psychological coping with its form of existence. For Simmel, the big city is dominated by objectivism (as opposed to subjectivism, with the individual at the center). Human interactions in the metropolis become short and instrumental, lacking the emotional and personal involvement of small communities. The city's inflation of sensory stimulus coerces man into being rational and instrumental in his social interactions, and he has to screen out much stimulus in order to psychologically be able to cope with everyday life. Therefore, in the metropolis, mental life is essentially intellectual, not emotional. People are enslaved to time, working under the clock. Everything in the city is measurable, qualitative value is reduced to quantitative and this yields what Simmel terms as "blasé" – superficiality, grayness, indifference and alienation. On the other hand, Simmel describes the metropolis as a place of liberation from the binding mentality of the small community, thus granting the individual more space and freedom to independently define himself.

Similarly, Marshall Berman describes the dual nature of this experience of the metropolis as ‘modernity’ stating that “to be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world- and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are”(15).

Rousseau’s personal life is testament to the dual nature of life in the metropolis. Once in the capital, Rousseau found work as a bailiff’s clerk and got married to his first wife Clemence Boitard. However due to personal circumstances of ill health, cramped quarters, the experience of “Siege of Paris in 1870 and the bloody civil war that was the Paris Commune, their life together was not easy” (Ireson 23). The couple’s first child died while still a baby during that period. HIs wife then died of tuberculosis in 1888 and he found himself alone to care for his teenage daughter- the only one of the couple’s eight children to reach adulthood. Rousseau remarried ten years after to a widower Josephine. Rousseau’s painting The Present and the Past 1899 portrays the artist’s very humane, and reflective character. In a life filled with tragedy and poverty, it is likely that with painting Rousseau found a means of joy, growth, adventure, transformation and most importantly, a therapeutic escape from the reality of everyday life.

In the painting Myself- Portrait Landscape 1890, Rousseau seem to have projected his transformation into an accomplished modern Parisian artist. Once again there is a duality to the painting, as it combines both portraiture and landscape- a style which he claimed to have invented. Here Rousseau appears not as a humble beginner but as a professor of painting and a master painter, assured of his powers. In fact, no matter how much ridicule he had to bear, he was well aware of his greatness as an artist. He wears in his buttonhole the badge of the palmes academiques and in his left hand he holds his palette inscribed with the names of his first and second wives Clemence and Josephine. Though there is more space than in the earlier pictures, there is little relationship between the figure and its setting: Rousseau stands awkwardly on tip toe and seems too big for the position he occupies, a disparity that is emphasized by the tiny figures of people walking along the quayside (Shattuck 46). The setting is characteristically Parisian, with the Eiffel Tower- then a very new construction, only erected the previous year for the International exhibition of 1889- in the background and a balloon sailing past in the sky. Colorful flags and the elongated silhouettes of the chimney- pots on the skyline add to the liveliness of the scene. “Taller than the Eiffel tower and dwarfing the ship moored in the quayside, as a modern painter complete with brushes and palette, Rousseau aligns himself with the modernity of the metropolis” ( Morris 69). The painting presents him as an upright citizen, one who is optimistic for his own future- and the future of his city.

TJ Clark writes “one of the things very often said at the time about Haussmannization was that it had ushered in an amount of make believe and uncertainty in modern life, especially in matters of social class. It is not not entirely clear that the charge was true, and that Paris was any fuller than usual of people pretending to be better or worse off than their incomes allowed. But the business of their doing so was visible and glittering in a new way” (Clark 206).

Other portrait landscapes by Rousseau include Portrait of Joseph Brummer 1909 and The Muse Inspiring the Poet 1909. However, his portrait Landscapes of children are some of the clearest examples of how he made the ordinary “extraordinary.” His Young Girl in Pink 1893-5 and Boy on the Rocks 1895-7 and To Celebrate the Baby 1903 offers an almost sinister, almost adult-looking appearance of the infants to the viewer and at a peculiar scale, one in which the figure takes up most of the canvas ( jungles 83).

Rousseau was greatly influenced by the World Fair in Paris . One of a number of international fairs that took place in Paris during Rousseau’s lifetime, the World fair was intended as a centennial celebration of the 1789 French Revolution and was a notable event. It emphasized the “ strength and power of the republic, its celebration of both technological development and colonial expansion- itself seen as a major contributing factor in French economic development- made it a popular and commercial triumph. Coinciding with France’s continuing, but far distant, campaign to subjugate the kingdom of Dahomey (1877-94), it brought closer to home a vision of the colonial ‘other’. Elaborate reconstructions of typical domestic settlements- each with a full complement of native inhabitants- from Senegal, Gabon and Congo were staged along the Place des Invalides” (Morris 15). The World Fair inscribed a colonial present within the symbolic heart of Republican France, as urgent and modern as the evident symbols of industrial progress.

At a time when many painters of the academy, as well as members of the avant-garde, abhorred the fact of the Eiffel Tower’s construction and avoided all references to intrusive modern technology in their work, Rousseau’s embrace of such imagery, though not unique, was notable. He seemed to be someone open to the changes happening around him. Rousseau, like thousands of his neighbours, both visited the fair and was swept up in the collective fervor that it provoked. From the experience, he wrote his first three act play called “A Visit to the 1889 Exhibition,” which tells the story of the simple Breton Family on a day’s outing to Paris, who laud this great exhibition (Morris 15).

It was only two years after in 1891 that Rousseau painted his first jungle scene- Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!). Earlier in the century, “exotic subjects had been a frequent source of inspiration to the orientalist painters who specialized in North African and Near Eastern subjects, finding in the external exotic a way of expressing the interior of the self” (Ireson 56). The jungle scenes displays a change in direction for the artist. The dreamscapes examined the unconscious and the inner life of the artist and notably predated Freud’s dream theory.

Rousseau, with his exotic dreamscapes, seems to have illustrated Nietzche’s description of modernity in Beyond Good and Evil 1882- “At these turning points in history there shows itself, juxtaposed and often entangled with one another, a magnificient, manifold, jungle like growing and striving, a sort of tropical tempo in rivalry of development, and an enormous destruction and self- destruction, thanks to egoisms violently opposed to one another, exploding, battling each other for sun and light, unable to find any limitation, any check, any considerateness within the morality at their disposal”(Berman 23). A duality existed among the exotic landscapes as well, as some were serene and peaceful thematically and others were dangerous, depicting animals in combat or man being attacked by animals.

Rousseau, having never left France, did not have to travel far to find source material for his exotic landscapes. For over a century, the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes had provided city dwellers with a taste of the faraway inside the city limits. “The Jardin featured a whole range of tropical plants and animals. There were hothouses, a large monkey house and a brand new aviary. There was also an impressive zoological galleries with stuffed animal exhibits” (Ireson 24). Rousseau often went there to draw. Therefore the method behind his exotic landscapes becomes clearer: “he inserted animals haphazardly into a dense and overwhelming background, adding and juxtaposing layers, sometimes sacrificing a feeling of depth. These paintings, as with some of the Parisian landscapes, acted like collages” (Morris 5).

Rousseau national pride and political views are expressed in his paintings. Like so many petit-bourgeois city- dwellers, having lived through war and civil conflict, he was highly patriotic and a firm believer in republican policies. In Rousseau’s grand works such as A Centennial of Independence 1892, the republic appeared as an ideal; one that delivered liberty of life and thought. The landscapes he painted, such as The Wedding 1904-5 and The Happy Quartet 1901-2 showed the effects of that government as a patriot would have understood them: “a tranquil, contented France where the sun is always shining and where even soldiers- like those in his The Artillerymen 1893-5 seem free from danger” (Ireson 45). These were not images made as propaganda: they were simply born of a particular historical context. Ironically, with his exotic scenes Rousseau unknowingly may have inspired a number of his admirers, such as Picasso and Alfred Jarry to use primitivism as a means of anarchy.

Patricia Leighten in her essay “The White Peril and le art Negre” argues that modernist artists incorporated African art forms and aesthetics in their work for not only aesthetic reasons, but to make social and political commentary about the French colonial policies in Africa. The borrowing of non- western visual forms, as practiced by Picasso and his friends, was known as Primitivism.

French colonial policy in Africa caused great scandals and debates in the 1905-6 period that resulted in the anticolonial positions taken by anarchists and socialists. Leighten’s essay offers a detailed look at the crimes committed by the colonials in Dahomey and both the French and Belgian Congo territories. She also describes the reactions in France and gives example of the outspoken anticolonial activists who influenced the public. These events occurred at the same time that Picasso, Vlaminck and Derain discovered African Art. From then onwards everything to do with African art became charged with political meaning.

Rousseau’s paintings such as the Sleeping Gypsy, the Snake Charmer and The Dream seem to demonstrate a certain empathy with the ‘other’- as he himself was referred to as a “primitive” and an outsider. In each painting the figure is a musician, a dreamer, and a romantic, much like Rousseau himself.

The Sleeping Gypsy 1897 may be regarded as one of Rousseau’s dreams and the gypsy as a projection of Rousseau himself, the ignored artist- musician? As for the lion, we must bear in mind that in his Jungle paintings “ Rousseau very seldom attributed cruelty to the lion and often endowed it with the stereotyped appearance of protective King of the Beasts, as he was to do in the foreground of Liberty inviting Artists to Take Part in the Twenty- second Exhibition of the Societe des Artistes independents 1905-06” ( Shattuck141). Since the Advent of Surrealism, the painting’s unique and astonishing atmosphere have widely been appreciated.

The inspiration for The Snake Charmer 1907, “according to Sonia Delaunay, was provided by the elder Madame Delaunay, who told Rousseau exotic tales from her trip to the West Indies” (Shattuck 176). Whatever its actual historical inspiration, the painting has gone beyond mere anecdote to become part of the rich Occidental tradition of myth, that of the Earthly Paradise, Orpheus, and the noble savage. In those days of explorations, colonial expeditions and intensive spread of religious missionary activity, the image of the savage , the creature to be civilized but in whom one could still nostalgically discover a kind of “innocence,” is an ambiguous one. Rousseau may have been heavily influenced by ” Gauguin at that period, whose paintings were being shown at the Parisian Salons (Shattuck 181).”

Woman and forest, each long understood as symbols of both mystery and paradise, thus converge in an enigmatic way in Rousseau’s art before their epiphanous combination in The Dream. It is speculated that Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia inspired The Dream. There is nothing of Manet in the formal construction of the Dream, but its motifs can quite reasonably be attributed to a typically personal reading of the Manets by Rousseau. “The process could be described as a selective “collaging” of elements Rousseau found in the two Manets and his own prior work plus an admixture of the exoticism and sensuousness of Ingre’s Grande Odalisque then hanging next to Olympia in the louvre” (Shattuck 76).

Observing the way in which Rousseau condensed information in his paintings,” Dada writer Tristan Tzara hypothesized that Rousseau’s art captured the experience of modern life itself. Overloaded with visual information, the modern mind was forced to summarise, to make sense of a situation so as to describe it effectively,” which, as Tzara argued, was the main strategy that underlied many of Rousseau’s work (Ireson 67)

Vincent Gille wrote “How do Rousseau’s painting collages reflect the time in which they were made? Are his Parisian Landscapes true to the city? Should his jungles be read within the socio-political context of colonialism? Rousseau was, in accordance with the era in which he lived, caught up in the whirlwind of a changing world. He lived in Paris but remained sensitive to nature. He painted professionally but was nonetheless inspired by postcards, colour prints and magazine images. He depicted wild animals in the middle of tropical rainforests but went no further than the greenhouses of Paris’s Jardin des Plantes and the zoological galleries of the museum d Histoire naturelle. He took what was around him: Paris and the people who animated its streets, as well as its world fairs with their colonial exhibitions and ‘black villages’ (reconstruction of primitive settlements). In this respect, Rousseau perfectly encapsulated the fin- de siècle era, where boundaries between city and nature, old and new, near and exotic, ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ became blurred; an era that, like Rousseau himself, produced a collage like aesthetic. This effect of selecting, juxtaposing and re- assembling created, in many different arenas, a strange disparity of vision, where reality was replaced with an illusion of the real. Appearing as the giddying filters of progress, science or universalism, such illusions often masked an ideological or political agenda, be it myth of the city of light or propaganda for the growing French empire. But they also evoked a sense of the supernatural, of the weird and wonderful, which rendered them devilishly effective” (Morris 50).

Rousseau was an artist who fully participated in his age and was familiar with many facets of Parisian life. TJ Clark claimed that Manet and the Impressionists where bourgeois artist and their claim to being modern depended on their being bound more closely to the interests and economic habits of the bourgeoisie they belonged to (260). Their sense of class and therefore the images they produced were limited to bourgeois ideology (Clark 260). “The ‘painting of modern life’ by Impressionists and Post- Impressionists thus often signified a retrograde sexual and class politics. Overall it represented a commodity in which the Parisian bourgeoisie found it easy to recognize itself, or was happy to own” ( Jones 368). Rousseau, however, is the anomaly that managed to give us the point of view of the petit bourgeoisie. His early Parisian Landscapes catered for the patronage of the petit- bourgeoisie, and with the political paintings he aimed at attaining state patronage and recognition- a goal which eluded him during his lifetime.

For Baudelaire, “new subjects required a new technique; just as there were appropriate forms that the modern in art could take, so too there were inappropriate forms. In these terms, paintings might not be inherently modern- by virtue, say, of techniques used in them – but modern by virtue of the context in which they were produced, and in relation to other representations. The term ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’ are not a matter of fixed definition but are relative and subject to historical change” (Frascina 55). Likewise, historians have found it difficult to define Rousseau within the realms of art history. Baudelaire’s poetry also seems to reflect Rousseau’s life and ambitions-

Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness. This obsessive idea is above all a child of giant cities, of the intersecting of their myriad relations.—Dedication of Le Spleen de Paris

A true visionary, Henri Rousseau titled his unpublished autobiographical note “Portraits for a Coming Century”. After his death 1910, the art dealer Wilhelm Uhde predicted that “when the time comes to write history of art for this era, the name Henri Rousseau will appear on the first page” (Ireson 7). Throughout the 1910’s and even into the 1920’s and 1930s, many important artists and critics continued to see Rousseau as a key figure in the development of twentieth- century art. He was greatly admired by the Surrealists and although he never made it to Mexico, it is ironic that both Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo found him to be greatly influential to their art. As Robert Delaunay put it, Rousseau was “the grandfather of the artistic revolution in Modern painting” (Ireson 8). Therefore it seems that Henri Rousseau may have been the quintessential painter of modern life.

Bibliography

Alley, Ronald. Portrait of a Primitive: The Art of Henri Rousseau. Oxford: Phaidon Press Limited, 1978. Print.

Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and other Essays. Oxford: Phaidon Press Limited, 1995. Print

Berman, Marshall. All that is Solid Melts Into Air-The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin Group, 1982. Print.

Clark, Timothy J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. New Jersey: Princeton Paperback Printing, 1986. Print.

Frascina, Francis, Nigel Blake, Briony Fer, Tamar Garb, Charles Harrison. Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Print.

Jones, Colin. Paris: The Biography of a City. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. Print.

Ireson, Nancy. Interpreting Henri Rousseau. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Print.

Leighten, Patricia. “The White Peril and l’art Negre- Picasso, Primitivism and Anti-colonialism” The Art Bulletin Dec. 1990: 609-630. Print.

Morris, Frances, Christopher Green, Vincent Gille, Nancy Ireson, Claire Freches-Thory, John House, Pascal Rousseau. Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Print.

Simmel Georg, The Metropolis and Mental Life. New York: Free Press, 1976. Print

Shattuck, Roger, Henri Behar, Micheel Hoog, Carolyn Lancher, and William Rubin. Henri Rousseau. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1985. Print.

Image list

1. War 1894

2. The Quarry 1896-7

3. Customs Post 1890

4. The Banks of the Bievre near Bicetre 1908

5. Saw Mill, Outskirts of Paris 1893

6. View of the Fortifications 1896

7. Myself- Portrait Landscape 1890

8. Portrait of Joseph Brummer 1909

9. The Muse Inspiring the Poet 1909

10. Young Girl in Pink 1893-5

11. Boy on the Rocks 1895-7

12. To Celebrate the Baby 1903

13. Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)

14. A Centennial of Independence 1892

15. The Wedding 1904-5

16. The Happy Quartet 1901-2

17. The Artillerymen 1893-5

18. Sleeping Gypsy 1897

19. Liberty inviting Artists to Take Part in the Twenty- second Exhibition of the Societe des Artistes independents 1905-06

20. The Snake Charmer 1907

21. The Dream 1910