Myself (table)

The fabric entitled Myself is a Portrait-landscape (Autoportrait) of the painter Henri Julien Felix Rousseau says Douanier Rousseau, carried out in 1890.

Description - Interpretation

The painter represents vêtu of black there, with a certain elegance, his beard being cut in a selected way. He wants to be worthy in his self-portrait. The character of the fabric holds a pallet and a brush. One can read, on the pallet, the first names Clémence (first name of her first wife Clémence Boitard) and Joséphine (first name of its second wife Joséphine Noury), which seems to be written in the place of another inscription erased as a preliminary. We thus find in these aspects of the fabric of the elements of the private life of the painter.

But Rousseau is also presented to it in the form of a public figure. It tries to give a character engaged to this fabric, while revealing there elements which translate its taste for modernity: one recognizes a metallic bridge, resolutely modern for his time, a Montgolfière (on the right of the head of the character) and the all recent Eiffel Tower, hardly perceptible behind the mast of the boat.

Also let us note the originality of the composition. One can observe that the provision of the boat -- which one sees only the prow and the mast -- is detached from ordinary, and constitutes a recurring element in the fabrics of the artist. Overall, let us recall that the author speaks about “carry-landscape” to indicate the category containing this table. It is indeed about a realization halfway between the Portrait -- representation of a person alone --, and of the Landscape which represents a landscape without giving such an amount of value to an element of the composition, nor, in particular with a character.

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