Noble Salvage.(analyzing the work of Henri Rousseau)

RICHARD SHONE ON HENRI ROUSSEAU

NAIF, PRIMITIVE, A SUNDAY PAINTER, childlike, a natural--these are some of the words long used to categorize Henri Rousseau and his work. All have been disputed, and none will do alone. But taken together, they give something of the flavor of this extraordinary artist, who possessed one of the most startling pictorial intelligences of his time. Self-taught, ambitious, and longing for official recognition, he emerged nearly fully formed in the mid-1880s. Between 1900 and his death in 1910 Rousseau made some of his most haunting and fantastic ...

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