Christopher Green is Emeritus Professor at the Couthauld Institute of Art. "There is nothing simple about Henri "Le Douanier" Rousseau by Prof C Green"

“The exhibition ‘Henri Rousseau, l’ambition de la peinture’, which I co-curated, finished in late July at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. It was a collaboration between the Orangerie/Musée d’Orsay and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, where it opened last October with the title ‘Henri Rousseau: a Painter’s Secrets’. The project came out of work I did with the conservators at the Barnes Foundation on the Rousseaus in the collection there. Relatively few survive, so the eighteen Albert C. Barnes bought, is the largest Rousseau collection in the world. The show featured the major Rousseaus from that collection, and also from the Orangerie, the second largest Rousseau collection in the world, and the Musée d’Orsay, which owns four of the most famous of his paintings, as well as loans from Japan and the U.S and Europe. In Paris, it attracted approaching 100,000 each month for four months – too many really, given that they had to queue outside for security right through the heat-waves.

I want my lecture to use revealing and sometimes unexpected things we’ve learned from doing the show and from new conservation research not just in Philadelphia but in Paris, but I want it to bring out how much we will never know about Rousseau the man, as well as things we do know, and to look at his paintings with the question in mind: just how simple was he as a man and a painter? He is still called ‘naïf’ by many. My title is: ‘There’s nothing simple about Henri ‘Le douanier’ Rousseau’.

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