The Past and the Present, or Philosophical Thought
Henri Rousseau
HENRI ROUSSEAU, 1899. OIL ON CANVAS.
Ten years on from the death of his first wife, Henri Rousseau married again. He painted this double portrait in the same year, in the style he had developed known as ‘portrait-landscapes’, to commemorate the occasion of this second union to Josephine Noury. She too had been widowed, and they both came into the relationship with the baggage of lost love. Above their heads, floating over as ghostly custodians, are the portraits of their past spouses painted in loving homage and gentle respect. Rousseau was considered a naïve painter, not trained in image making and, when he began, ignorant of the styles of the day or the masters who came before him. Yet this naivety proved to be a gift; unshackled from convention he painted freely and truthfully, developing a style distinctly of his own. Compositionally, so much of art reappropriates the established styles that have come before, yet Rousseau knew little of these and so the physical arrangement of his figures and landscapes exist in a world entirely of their own, perhaps never clearer than in this masterful work.