"Remember, Rousseau, the Aztec landscape / the forests where grows the banana trees and mangos/the monkeys spilling all the blood of the watermelons / and the blond emperor shot there? / The pictures that you paint, you saw them in Mexico / a red sun adorns the forehead of the banana trees / and valiant soldier, you changed your tunic / for the blue jacket of a honest custom inspector"

Guillaume Apollinaire

Naïf, primitivist, sauvage . Too many adjectives to describe an indescribable artist, arguably the most original and uninhibited of all the artists emerged after the twilight of the impressionism. Henri "Le Douanier" Rousseau was born on May 21st in Laval , France , son of a local tinsmith. Contrary of many famous artists of his generation, Rousseau was not early attracted by Art, and he spend seven years of his life in the Army, where he was sentenced after steal 20 francs in a lawyer's office. This sentence, besides to initiate the fame of "savage" of Rousseau, caused that he did not initiate its painting practices until principles of the decade of the 1870, copying classic in the Louvre and Versailles .

A CARNIVAL NIGHT - THE BEGINNINGS

In 1886 a strange exhibition organized by the Societé des Independants was inaugurated in Paris , in which two works exhibited attracted all the attention: the first was the famous one "Sunday afternoon in the Island of Grande Jatte", by Georges Seurat. The second, "A carnival night", by a stranger customs agent called Henri Rousseau. But the reasons by which the two pictures were highly commented were well different: the work by Seurat was applauded as audacious and novel. The Rousseau picture, with his apparently coarse and infantile style, caused laughs and mocks, and only thanks to the intervention of Tolouse-Lautrec Rousseau could avoid to be excluded from the exhibition.

This was not strange: most of the critic, which only with great difficulty had admitted the impressionism as an acceptable artistic tendency, was very far from being prepared for the original style of Rousseau, which nevertheless was very far from being infantile or "ignorant". On the contrary, it was a brave and meditated modernist experiment of a well knower of the Art History. Picasso himself said about Henri Rousseau: "The case of Rousseau is not exceptional; it represents a perfectly structured form about how to see the arts"

In the "Self-portrait, picture-landscape" (1890, Národni Galerie, Prague) Rousseau makes a storing of all its pictorial ideas: the figure of the painter is inserted, without no respect for the perspective, the scale or the point of view, in the middle of a landscape in which we can see the Carrousel Bridge on the Seine River. The presence of the self-portrayed is so powerful that not only minimizes the rest of human figures of the composition, but that its stature surpasses even to the one of the Eiffel Tower .

SURPRISE!

We have already commented that in his first exhibitions in the "Salón des refusés" and "Societé des Indépendants", Rousseau attracted the attention of critics and artists with its primitive and colourist style, but is not until 1891 when the customs officer is able to cause an extraordinary astonishment when exposing in the "Salón des Indépendants" the disturbing canvas with the disquieting title of " Surprise!", which show a ferocious, dangerous beast in the middle of a fantastic rainforest background. Clearly influenced by the exotic trees and vegetation that the painter observed in the conservatories and botanical gardens, the work supposes a first approximation to the exotic paintings that Rousseau would paint almost 15 years after.

In 1894, shortly after retiring, Rousseau painted one of his more ambitious projects: the terrible picture of "the War" (1894, Paris, Musée d' Orsay) that took the subtitle of "Passes swiftly horrifying men and women and by all the sides it leaves behind if desperation, tears and destruction ". The face of the War is wild and terrible. However, between the dead men and women we can hardly contemplate a single face; as if Rousseau wanted to cause that its plea against the War was the most universal possible.

In 1897, in the "Salón des Indépendants", Rousseau showed one of his masterworks displaying " The sleepy Gypsy " (New York , Museum of Modern Art ), that took the subtitle of "the beast, although wild, doubt if to throw itself over his victim, deeply slept of fatigue ". The work, fantastic until the point that its boldness surpasses any postimpressionist or symbolist work, was described by Jean Cocteau: From where such a creature could have fallen? From the moon (.) The gypsy did not arrive to that place where she is sleeping. She is there. She is not there. She does not occupy any human place. She lives on the reflection."

RAINFOREST DREAMS

Salvador Dalí said about his strange picture "African Impressions " (1938) that " Africa must count for something in my work, because, although never I have been there, I remember it perfectly!" Something similar could say Henri Rousseau about the exotic American forests that, from 1904 to his death, would become the fundamental motifs of his works, although he had never crossed the Atlantic .

In "Unpleasant surprise" (1901, Barnes Foundation) Rousseau already showed a wild beast attacking a defenceless woman. This picture - that impressed Renoir himself- shows the most terrible and violent side of the wild nature, as does the "Fight between a tiger and a buffalo" (1908, Cleveland Museum of Art), "Fight between gorilla and a Indian" (1910, Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), or " The repast of the lion " (1907, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) Contrasting with the violence of these canvases, we found the glad narrative of " The glad jokers" (1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art) or the lyricism of " The snake charmer " (1907, Paris, Orsay)

But the unquestionable masterpiece of this period, summit of the Rousseau's Art along with "The sleepy Gypsy", is "The Dream " (1910, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), a sensational painting that reunites in it all the magic and fantasy of the Art by Le Douanier Rousseau, who explained the work with this suggestive speech: "The woman in the sofa dreams that she has been transferred to this forest and she listens to the sound of the snake charmer."

The origins of these fantastically exotic works are so complex that they would force us to an impossible trip within the mind of Le Douanier Rousseau, inhabited by the admiration for Baudelaire's "The flowers of the evil", the poetries of his friend Apollinaire, and the fascination by the wild nature so typical of the Bohemian artists of end of the 19 th century.