#AtoZChallenge: Rousseau, Henri (Picasso)

Henri Rousseau was known by his friends and fellow artists as La Douanier (the Customs Officer) due to the fact that he was a toll or tax collector. Rousseau was about 37 years older than Picasso, and Picasso had great reverence for Rousseau’s unique artistic ability. Personally, I have always admired Rousseau’s style. His more famous works are jungle scenes that he painted without ever having seen or visited a jungle.

In 1908 at the Bateau Lavoir, Picasso threw a banquet in honor of Rousseau. At the time of what became to be known as Le Banquet Rousseau, the older artist was about 62 years old. Rousseau had focused on his painting since he was 49, still working part time as a douanier. Rousseau “retired” in 1903, but he would also do odd jobs such as playing the violin in the streets. Completely self-taught, Rousseau is now considered an eccentric genius.

–photo of Rousseau, taken by Picasso

From an article in a Polish magazine that I thought captured the banquet and its long-term implications better than most:

Towards the end, the banquet took a rather unexpected turn, the hitherto private event attracted a crowd of painters, poets and ordinary clochards, pushing in through the doors and windows to Picasso’s little “salon”. Most of them were daubers, dressed in the then trendy wide-rimmed hats, colourful jackets, long boots, bandanas, a herald of the hippie movement several decades later, tied on their long hair, and, the latest in avant-garde fashion, proudly sporting military jackets. The newcomers, already merry, focused chiefly on consumption, stuffing their pockets with the cakes, which made Picasso’s lover furious. In the increasingly stuffy air, surrounded by a chaotic company that was completely uninterested in him, Henri ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau decided to play first, or rather last, fiddle for once, fetching his violin and delivering Waltz for Clémence, composed specially for the evening, for the “fans” gathered in the room. There was a frantic ovation but as Le Douanier, exhausted, had slumped from his chair to the floor during the last wistful phrase, Picasso decided to conclude the event.

A cab was summoned to take Douanier Rousseau down the Montmartre. Before departing, the critically intoxicated painter thought it fit to make a short speech directed at Picasso: “You and I are the greatest painters of our time,” he said. “You in the Egyptian style, I in the modern!” The words, which appear funny only at first sight, were probably not much to the Spanish genius’s liking. The remaining guests, including Derain, who, amid the remains of Alice Toklas’s hat, slept in the storeroom until morning, went to sleep with the hosts on the sofa and the floor. The banquet was hailed as a success and on the very next day it became a legend.

The Douanier banquet turned out to have been a benefit event not only for the naïve painter but also for the Bateau-Lavoir. Picasso and Fernande soon moved out of the cramped space and moved into a centrally heated, spacious apartment in a prestigious, passenger lift-equipped tenement house on the Montparnasse. The “Boat” was left by many other, later famous, artists as well.

The most serious consequences of the evening at Picasso’s were enjoyed, however, by Douanier Rousseau himself. What was originally conceived as a lavish joke by the recently enriched Picasso transformed Rousseau into a full-time artist who started to be appreciated not only by the increasingly important post-Impressionists. A mere two years before his death, Henri Rousseau earned the reputation of a respected artist, attracting large numbers of followers, including many among academically educated painters. Le Douanier became history – his dream was fulfilled.