ArtWay Visual Meditation 10 November 2024
Henri Rousseau: Surprised!
Mingled Danger and Glory
by Otto Bam
However much modern life might aim at insulating us from the unexpected, the painful, and the mysterious, the world remains a place that frustrates prediction and precludes certainty. Life remains full of surprises – many of them undesirable. At the same time our lives are characterised by encounters with wonder and beauty that can be equally surprising. This two-fold nature of life’s surprises finds expression in the painting Surprised! (1891) by French artist Henri Rousseau.
Rousseau inspired pioneers of modern art like Matisse and Picasso. Robert Delaunay, French painter and theoretician who was also a key figure in the emergence of abstract art, called Rousseau the “grandfather of the artistic movement in modern painting.” In many ways, Rousseau was an unlikely character to bear this title. He was no prodigy and only took up serious painting around the age of forty. He had previously been working in a municipal toll office for the city of Paris (hence the nickname “Le Douanier”). He was indiscriminate in the audience he was willing to paint for. At times he attempted to gain the attention of the elite of Parisian society, which he did, but for all the wrong reasons: his work was severely mocked and derided by the artistic establishment. At other times, he painted for the petit bourgeoisie, the lower middle class, of which he was a part. He had no formal training as an artist and did not exhibit the sort of intellectualism of others in the avant-garde of his day. While artists like Cézanne acquired and then departed from the academic style preferred by the Paris Salon, Rousseau had no training to react against. He simply… painted.
So what was it that so appealed to his admirers that he became revered as a pioneer? It was, in fact, his naive disregard of custom. He did not, for example, follow the rules of perspective. His canvasses were flat and objects were painted out of proportion. He would eventually become best known for his so-called exotic paintings. In these, every leaf, every blade of grass and every flower is individually drawn with solid outlines, which is the sort of habit that the most basic art instruction would have a young artist unlearn as soon as possible. The effect he achieved was sometimes described as ‘primitive’. For some, this was pejorative, but his admirers thought that this simplicity was exactly what was needed for a new movement in art.
Surprised!, the earliest of his exotic paintings, arrests one’s attention upon first glance. It is fairly large (129.8 × 161.9 cm), and depicts a tiger in a verdant forest. Parisians of Rousseau’s day had an appetite for the so-called exotic – images and stories from faraway, ’uncivilised’ lands. But what Rousseau produces is not an image that pretends to imitate an observed tiger or a real forest. He had never travelled beyond the bounds of his own country, and had never seen a living tiger. For his model he had only the taxidermy tigers held at the local zoo and popular illustrations of wild animals published by a department store.
Describing Rousseau’s art as primitive might be thought to be a mere idealisation of a distant past, but I think there is considerable merit to the description. In presenting an image with no specific geographical or historical referent Rousseau transports us into the sphere of the imagination and of myth – this is a place further than memory, outside of history, even perhaps, Edenic.
Here we come face to face with all of what is both beautiful and what is startling. “Tyger, tyger, burning bright, / in the forests of the night; / what immortal hand or eye, / could frame thy fearful symmetry?” wrote William Blake, drawing on the image of a tiger to represent the sublime power of nature and its transfixing glory. The lightning bolt and what appears to be a tropical storm in Rousseau’s painting echoes this sense of the sublime power of elemental forces. But Rousseau’s tiger presents us with an ambiguity, particularly in its oddly human facial expression. It looks frightened. We are invited to sympathise with the predator.
This raises the question, what does the title, Surprised!, refer to? Is the tiger surprised by a sudden storm or a lightning bolt? Is its prey about to be taken by surprise? Perhaps the tiger is not surprised by anything visible in the painting, but by a sudden awareness of being observed by a human audience, by us! On the one hand, the tiger and the lightning represent what frightens us. On the other, the tiger itself seems under threat, and the trees and plants all bow under the weight of the great power of the storm.
There is much in the world to startle us. Much that seems too great to comprehend. Daily we hear of war and violence and we wrestle the powerful and contradictory desires within ourselves – desires that can be alarmingly wild and disordered. Rousseau’s painting, by stripping back the specifics of history, demonstrates how art can call on the imagination to help us confront both the harsh and beautiful in our world with its mingled danger and glory. And, perhaps, like Blake’s poem, it will lead us to that deeper question which, however simple, bears perpetual contemplation: “who made thee?”
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Henri Rousseau: Surprised!, 1891, oil on canvas, 129.8 × 161.9 cm.
Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) was was born in Laval, Mayenne, France. He was a self-taught artist who took up serious painting late in life. He viewed his painting very seriously, despite facing ridicule from some quarters. A number of artist and writers, particularly from the avant-garde, hailed him as an important figure. He is now seen as a pioneer of ‘naïve art’. (See https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/henri-rousseau-surprised)
Otto Bam is a South African writer and musician. He is the co-editor of ArtWay and the arts manager for the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology in Cambridge. He has a master’s degree in English Studies from Stellenbosch University, South Africa, as well as master’s degree in religion and literature from the University of Edinburgh.
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