The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia has opened a major retrospective exhibition featuring the work of Henri Rousseau, the celebrated French post-impressionist who was dismissed during his lifetime as naive but held many secrets. Known for his strange jungle scenes and dreamscapes, Rousseau was a self-taught artist in late 19th-century Paris who struggled to be recognized throughout his entire career. "Henri Rousseau: A Painter's Secrets" features almost 60 paintings from institutions around the world, representing the largest collection of Rousseau's work ever assembled.
Rousseau's life was marked by extraordinary personal and financial difficulties. His ambition far outstripped his success during his lifetime, according to curator Nancy Ireson of the Barnes Foundation. "Rousseau had terrible things said about him in the press," Ireson explained. "Journalists said that he painted with his feet, with his eyes closed. They called him all sorts of things. He didn't sell his works, yet he keeps making art. He clearly has this unshakable self-belief."
The artist's turbulent personal history reveals a complex character behind the seemingly naive paintings. While growing up, his family lost their home in Laval, France, to debts and lived in boarding houses. As a young man, he worked for a lawyer and began studying law but was convicted of embezzling money from his employer, then joined the army to avoid prison. Rousseau worked most of his life as a low-level customs clerk in Paris, retiring in his 50s to paint full-time.
Even after dedicating himself to art, Rousseau continued to run afoul of the law for unpaid debts on art supplies and for bank fraud, for which he was briefly imprisoned. "He was not an honest man," said Christopher Green, who co-curated the exhibition with Ireson. "He was passing false checks with a friend of his who devised a rather complicated fraud." During his trial, Rousseau's defense attorney held up one of his paintings in court and argued, "Could somebody who painted a picture like this really have known what a check was?" The strategy worked – Rousseau likely knowingly leveraged his reputation as a naive artist for leniency, and the judge gave him a suspended sentence.
The exhibition's title refers not only to Rousseau's secretive personal life but also to the mysteries contained within his canvases. His flattened compositions have the simplicity of folk art, with most figures facing squarely forward and rarely seen in profile. However, his work also demonstrates sophisticated draftsmanship, precise brushwork, and inspired use of color. His famous "The Sleeping Gypsy," borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, features a multicolored pinstriped dress that echoes the subject's hair and the strings of a lute lying beside her.
Rousseau's jungle paintings, which gained popularity toward the end of his life, contain bizarre shifts of perspective and proportion. These works feature gigantic flowers, trees that don't quite make sense, deformed animals, and incongruous figures, such as an American Indigenous person fighting a gorilla in what appears to be a botanical garden. Remarkably, Rousseau never traveled outside of France and had no idea what a jungle actually looked like. "What we do know is that Rousseau was really inspired by visits to the botanical gardens in Paris," Ireson noted. "He went often to the Jardin des Plantes, which is in the city, and there he would enter the hot houses. He really loved seeing those different species of plant."
Green described Rousseau as "a story giver, not a storyteller," explaining that "he gives you the materials for a story, but he doesn't necessarily tell you how you're going to tell this to yourself. It's very suggestive and sometimes quite ambiguous." In some of Rousseau's nighttime jungle paintings, the background foliage is layered black on black, creating subtle shifts of depth. Almost all his paintings contain an element of fantasy that invites multiple interpretations.
Despite facing constant personal and professional setbacks, Rousseau remained steadfast in his belief in his own talent. "It's just extraordinary, the chutzpah of the man. The complete refusal ever to be discouraged," Green observed. "It can only come from a faith in what he was doing." This unwavering confidence sustained him through decades of ridicule and financial hardship.
Recognition for Rousseau's artistic achievements came only posthumously. It was 15 years after his death in 1910 before his talents were widely recognized, and even that recognition was due to strategic dealmaking. Berthe Comtesse de Delaunay sold "The Snake Charmer" to collector Jacques Doucet on the condition that upon the buyer's death, the painting would be bequeathed to the Louvre Museum, which it was in 1925. Once Rousseau's work entered France's national collection, his reputation for the next century was secured.
The retrospective at the Barnes Foundation brings together some of Rousseau's most ambitious works for the first time, including "The Sleeping Gypsy" from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "The Snake Charmer" from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and "Unpleasant Surprise" from the Barnes collection. Other notable works in the exhibition include "The Football Players" (1908) on loan from the Guggenheim Museum, showing young men playing rugby football, a sport that made its Olympic debut in Paris in 1900.
"Henri Rousseau: A Painter's Secrets" will remain on view at the Barnes Foundation until February 22, 2026. The exhibition was organized collaboratively by the Barnes Foundation, which holds the largest collection of Rousseau paintings in the world, and the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, which has the second-largest collection.
