Transcript Exotic Landscapex

Art Awareness –
Henry Rousseau
Jeffrey Zalc
Mrs. Fister’s 3rd grade class
February 24, 2014
Henry Rousseau
Henry Rousseau – His Origin
• Artist who was born in 1844 in Lavel, France
Henry Rousseau – Life and Art
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Although he didn’t do well in school, he excelled in art and music. He wanted to be an
artist, but his parents could not afford to send him to art school.
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Rousseau quit his job as a toll collector at age 49 to paint full-time. Rousseau
painted scenes of Paris and its suburbs, bouquets of flowers, portraits of his
friends, and forests populated by wild and fantastic beasts. He created a lush
imaginary world that was inspired by what he saw in advertisements and at the
botanical garden in Paris.
While Rousseau’s work was not easily classified into any artistic style of the time, it
has been considered a forerunner of Surrealism because of its dream-like
sensibility.
Art critics and the public ridiculed his work.
No matter what the art critics said, Rousseau knew his work was good. Once he
gave his grandchild a painting he made and said ―Hold on to this. One day it will
be worth a hundred thousand francs.‖ He was almost right, because his paintings
are worth far more than that. Today his paintings are shown in the greatest
museums of the world.
– One of his paintings sold in 2009 for $2,882,500.
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Henry Rousseau –Art and Style
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Famous for painting jungle scenes and human figures
He never left France or was in a jungle
– Read and talked to people who had traveled, plus visited botanical gardens
– "When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it
seems to me that I enter into a dream.“
Entirely self-taught and known as a “naive” artist
– Painted in “childlike”, flat style with little perspective
– Bright, vivid colors
– Simple shapes
Exotic Landscape (1908)
Exotic—Unusual or excitingly
different in color or
design.
Landscape—A scene or view
of land, such as mountains,
fields and forests
Exotic Landscape (1908)
Exotic—Unusual or excitingly
different in color or
design.
Landscape—A scene or view
of land, such as mountains,
fields and forests
Exotic Landscape (1908)
Exotic—Unusual or excitingly
different in color or
design.
Landscape—A scene or view
of land, such as mountains,
fields and forests
Exotic Landscape (1908)
Artistic Elements:
• Color
• Shape
• Repetition
• Contrast
Exotic Landscape (1908)
Dark monkeys play among the lush foliage. Several
monkeys in the foreground are nearly concealed and
peek out from behind the tropical greenery, as does
the red sun hanging low in the sky.
Several shapes repeat throughout this painting. The
organic shapes of leaves and fronds repeat to create
the dense tropical forest. Orange circles (tropical fruits,
perhaps?) repeat from top to bottom in this painting
and serve to move our eye around the work by
providing a visual link of warm color that contrasts with
the cool greens that dominate the scene.
Rousseau repeated a line of white tipped snake plants
across the bottom of the painting providing an anchor
for the vertical format of this scene. The bright plants
visually contrast with the darker foliage and provide
textural contrast with the other leaves and fronds
in the painting.
Exotic Landscape (1910)
Craft
Make a jungle scene of your own like those
of Rousseau!
• Use white paper as your background
• Create a jungle scene using:
• Vivid colors of markers
• Cutting out animal- or plantshapes from foam or colored
paper and gluing them on
• HAVE FUN!