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The French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) pursued an ideal in his quest to capture a spirit of innocence. While still very much rooted in French city life, and for many-years a conventional man, he nevertheless projected images of an exotic world of magic and freshness. Known as “Le Douanier” because he worked for the Paris [...]
His is the simple and yet incredible story of an unworldly petit bourgeois who painted in an introverted, almost autistic manner. He himself cannot have been fully aware of what he was doing; he did not distinguish between his pictures and reality, and in art as in life remained gullible to the end. It is [...]
For all of them Henri Rousseau was the “venerable child” of art, the great primitive who lived and worked beyond the reach of damaging speculation and sophistication, at one with himself, original, as nature had made him. Conscious, deliberate action was seen as a negative ingredient of culture, and Rousseau was quickly acclaimed as the [...]
It’s been said, oversimplistically but sympathetically, that “he didn’t know the rules well enough to break them”. But of course there are no rules in the kingdom of the imagination.He knew he was a babe in the woods of high art but sought to exploit his very naivete, and gradually, splitting open rules like coconuts, [...]
What was a nude on a sofa doing in the middle of the jungle? It was all quite simple, said Henri Rousseau: “You will no longer find that amazing in the future?” The artist’s ability to combine naturalistic elements in a startling manner and create a mysterious place that could exist only in the imagination [...]
“There’s no one more punctual than a woman one doesn’t love” ( “Kean” by Jean Paul Sartre ) From its declining fortunes Drury Lane Theatre was to be rescued, briefly, by the arrival of Edmund Kean, the most fiery and thrilling actor of his day. His passionate and naturalistic approach to Shakespeare gave audiences a [...]
The intense freshness of “the first moving instant vision” provoked by an object. But actually to copy that object increased the distance from that vision. There is always the danger,Pierre Bonnard felt, of the artist’s becoming caught by the incidentals of direct, immediate sight and losing the initial vision along the way. Hence, although he [...]
Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was not a revolutionary artist but he synthesized several different styles to create works of striking painterliness and memorably glorious color. He borrowed a lightness from the Impressionists, a bold palette from the Post-Impressionists and Fauves, a compressed dimensionality from Matisse and added an immense intensity of his own. His oeuvre combines the poignancy [...]
Human monocular and bifocal vision is very different to the action of the camera lens. In fact, Bonnard’s paintings get much more complex spatially when he gives up using the camera around 1920, and relies more and more on his drawings as the wellspring for his ideas and images. Bonnard states: “The lens records unnecessary [...]
“Brown and Dilke walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously–I mean Negative Capability, [...]
