Portrait of a Primitive : The Art of Henri Rousseau

Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Brown cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. 68 illustrations, 27 in colour. 80 pages clean and tight. Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) is a strange figure in French twentieth-century art. He pursued his own simple untutored course throughout all the years when his contemporaries were experimenting with new styles and movements. Rousseau's simplicity and naivety were notorious and, always gullible, he often found himself the victim of practical jokers. But his own confidence in himself as an artist never wavered, even if others found it difficult to take him seriously. In some ways his paintings are very sophisticated, the design and colours worked out in rare and intricate detail. Their appeal lies at once in their directness and their depth. These paintings, at first the spare-time occupation of a minor government official (Rousseau was, in fact, a toll-collector in Paris - hence his rather misleading nickname 'Le Douanier'), are often poetic evocations of exotic lands. where lions and tigers lurk among luxuriant undergrowth. Perspective ant scale have little place in his work, but it was probably the extraordinary realism that he could achieve while ignoring visual conventions that appealed so much to Picasso and his circle and brought Rousseau to wider notice as the first of the so-called `modern primitives' or 'na~ve painters'. The life and work of this unworldly but endearing artist are well described and illustrated in this outstanding new survey. Ronald Alley is Keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate Gallery, London. Jacket illustration: Detail from Myself. Portrait-Landscape (Prague, National Gallery) Size: 4to. …