CONTENTS

Introduction by NANCY IRESON p. 7

Recollections of Henri Rousseau

WILHELM UHDE p. 23

List of illustrations p. 94

Opposite: Avenue in the Park at Saint-Cloud, 1908

Only a handful of the biographers who wrote about Rousseau in the first half of the twentieth century had known the painter himself. Wilhelm Uhde, the author of this memoir, was one of them. He had been a frequent visitor to the artist’s studio on the Rue Perrel and it was there, through looking and listening, that he built up his unique picture of ‘le Douanier’. The text he created—published just months after the artist’s death in September —was the first monograph to describe this extraordinary man. The text in this volume—in an author-approved translation—is a revised version of that early account.

Uhde was born in Germany in . He studied law at university but, having travelled to Florence, he developed a passion for art history. Subsequently, frustrated by the lack of intellectual freedom in his homeland, he moved to Paris at the age of thirty. The year was  and, as an art-lover, the young man began to frequent the various exhibitions of the new avant-garde. Excited by what he saw—and particularly by the work of the ‘Fauve’ painters—he lost no time in adopting their cause. He bartered with the artists he came to know so well and, though his means were limited, he soon became one of the most influential of the city’s dénicheurs (bargain-hunters). Through his charm and his skills at negotiation, he managed to purchase works by Picasso, Braque, Derain and Dufy. Some he sold; others he kept for his own collection. In , in a marriage of convenience, he married the painter Sonia Terk. This move enabled her to stay in France and, seemingly, allowed Uhde to conceal his homosexuality.

From his very first years in Paris, Uhde would have known of Rousseau’s work. In , at the Salon d’Automne, the artist’s Hungry Lion (Fondation Beyeler, Basel, illustrated pp. -) had caused quite a sensation. Rousseau was also a regular contributor to the Salon des Indépendants, a jury-free society to which he had belonged since . However, even though Rousseau was in his sixties by this time, he was yet to find real success as a painter. His works often attracted little more than pity or derision. Thus in the spring of , when he displayed The Representatives of Foreign Powers Coming to Greet the Republic as a Sign of Peace (Musée Picasso, Paris, illustrated opposite) his works were still a source of amusement for visitors. This canvas must be the image that

The Representatives of Foreign Powers Coming to Greet the Republic as a Sign of Peace, 

Uhde refers to in his text as ‘The Sovereigns’. ‘Anyone who suggested that the work might have artistic merits would have been rushed off to the asylum at Charenton,’ he remembered.

Perhaps Uhde himself had harboured reservations at that point. However, thanks to Robert Delaunay, the dealer would soon take the artist seriously. Delaunay was one of the other painters in whom Uhde took an interest and the dealer respected his opinion (he divorced Sonia Terk, so that she and Delaunay could marry, in ). Both Rousseau and Delaunay were exhibitors at the Salon des Indépendants and it was there that they had met in . They had become friends and Delaunay, young and from a rather privileged background, had been shocked at his friend’s financial hardships. He decided to try and help ‘le Douanier’ to make a living from his art and persuaded his mother to furnish Rousseau with a commission.

Berthe Delaunay was a keen socialite who had travelled extensively. The painting that Rousseau made for her—supposedly based upon her tales of India—was The Snake Charmer (Musée d’Orsay, Paris; illustrated pp. -). Faced with this extraordinary image, it seems, Uhde was compelled to find out more about the artist responsible. This canvas showed a mysterious, gifted figure that attracted the viewer but seemed unfamiliar: one as exceptional and intriguing, perhaps, as Rousseau himself. Thus, over the next few years, the dealer nurtured his acquaintance with the painter. ‘It did not take me long to realise how passionately he devoted himself to mastering the teeming visions of his brain,’ Uhde recalled. He purchased works and he attended the concerts that the artist organised in his home. It was someone he knew—an old painter who played the violin, who lived for art, who had suffered the trials of life—whom he tried to capture in his biography.

Uhde’s personal approach was important. Already, even within the painter’s lifetime, the dealer’s contemporaries had begun to mythologise the artist. By outlining the details of Rousseau’s life, in contrast, Uhde took on the task of refuting some of those preconceptions. Some writers, for instance, had believed that Rousseau was a Breton and had treated his painting as though it was folk art. The dealer explained that the artist was actually from Laval, a market town in the Mayenne. Others persisted in calling Rousseau ‘le Douanier’, the ‘customs man’, in reference to the years that the painter had spent working for the civil service. Uhde wrote that Rousseau had in fact worked for the Octroi, a municipal service

Overleaf: The Sleeping Gypsy, ; first shown in public at the th Salon des Indépendants that imposed duty on goods entering the city. Thus he showed that the ‘Douanier’ sobriquet was inaccurate and, in relating stories of how the artist had been ridiculed by his colleagues, he implied that if Rousseau did not belong to the avant-garde world he had also stood out from his petit-bourgeois peers.

Most importantly, then, Uhde conveyed the message that appearances could be misleading. ‘Behind the façade of the poor little customs man lay a rich, strong and mysterious personality,’ he wrote in the first version of his text. He went on to describe how the artist worked during the years of their acquaintance: in a small studio, in an unglamorous district of Paris, in close proximity to his lower-middle-class neighbours. Significantly, too, he tried to stop speculation that was rife at the time as to which avant-garde figure had ‘discovered’ Rousseau. He framed the question as irrelevant: ‘Rousseau’s sense of artistic mission was so strong that he required no external stimulus.’ Indeed, since subsequent research has revealed that neither Jarry nor Gauguin was the first to notice Rousseau (since his reputation built gradually through responses to his submissions at the Indépendants), he was right to do so. He also observed that – contrary to popular opinion—‘le Douanier’ was not literally ‘naïve’.

In the nineteenth century ‘naïveté ’, in terms of innocence and freshness, had been a desirable quality for artists to nurture in their work and Rousseau himself had claimed that he had ‘kept his naïveté ’ on the recommendation of the academic painters he had met. The qualities that some viewers had thought resulted from the painter’s simplicity or ignorance, in Uhde’s text, were recast as stylistic choices.

Uhde emphasised all that was unique about Rousseau. He described ‘le Douanier’ as a timeless artist, one who could capture something more than a physical likeness or a fleeting impression. Once again, responding to the criticisms that his contemporaries had levied at the artist, he argued that it was of little matter if Rousseau’s portraits did not resemble their subjects. Uhde’s Rousseau could sense the personality of a sitter. In this light, rather than a simple description of a face, the Portrait of a Lady (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, illustrated p. ), which Uhde believed was a portrait of the artist’s first wife, became ‘a hymn to youth and love’. The so-called ‘lamp portraits’, meanwhile, conveyed a wealth of domestic peace and harmony. This strategy not only allowed Uhde to extricate the artist from accusations of naïveté and ignorance, but also enabled him to align Rousseau with a whole lineage of great French painters from Poussin to Corot. In perhaps the most curious passage of the essay he described an occasion when, working on one of his jungle canvases, Rousseau claimed his late wife guided

List of illustrations

p.  Self-portrait with a lamp, -,    cm, Musée Picasso, Paris p.  Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest, c. -, 5   cm, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia p.  Avenue in the Park at Saint-Cloud, ,    cm, Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt p.  The Muse Inspiring the Poet (Guillaume Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin, second version), ,    cm, Kunstmuseum, Basel p.  The Representatives of Foreign Powers Coming to Greet the Republic as a Sign of Peace, ,    cm, Musée Picasso, Paris pp. - The Sleeping Gypsy, ,    cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York pp. - The Snake Charmer, ,    cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris pp. - Artillerymen, c. -,    cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York p.  Myself, Portrait-Landscape, ,    cm, Národní galerie, Prague pp. - Surprised!, ,    cm, The National Gallery, London p.  The Toll-House (The Customs Post), c. ,    cm, The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London p.  Portrait of a Lady (The artist’s first wife?), -,    cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris p.  Carnival Evening, ,    cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art pp. - A Centennial of Independence, ,    cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles p.  To Celebrate the Baby, ,    cm, Kunstmuseum, Winterthur pp. - The Hungry Lion throws itself upon the Antelope, ,    cm, Fondation Beyeler, Basel p.  Past and Present, ,    cm, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia pp. - Tropical Forest with Monkeys, ,    cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC p.  The Artist Painting his Wife, -,    cm, Private Collection p.  Meadowland (The Pasture), ,    cm, Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo pp. - The Dream, ,    cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York p.  The Promenade in the Forest, c. ,    cm, Kunsthaus, Zürich p.  Portrait of a Woman, ,    cm, Musée Picasso, Paris p.  The Eiffel Tower, c. ,    cm, Museum of Fine Art, Houston p.  Portrait of Joseph Brummer, ,    cm, Private Collection p.  Portrait of Pierre Loti, c. ,    cm, Kunsthaus, Zürich p.  Woman in Red in the Forest, c. ,  x  cm, Private Collection p.  Eve, c. -,    cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg p.  The Wedding Party, c. ,    cm, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris pp. - War (Discord on Horseback), ,    cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Illustrations on pp. , ,  and  © Bridgeman Art Library; on pp. - courtesy J. Paul Getty Museum; on pp.  and  courtesy

The Barnes Foundation; on pp. , , , , -, -, , -, , , , , -, , -, , , ,  and - courtesy Wikimedia Commons; on p.  Wikimedia Commons, courtesy ArishG; on pp. - courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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