View of Parc de Montsouris 1895

Henri Rousseau, a self-taught artist working in France, likely made this View of Parc de Montsouris with commercially produced oil paints on a canvas prepared in advance. Rousseau favored readily available materials, reflecting his status outside the traditional art world. He built up the image with deliberate layers, capturing the textures and details of the park with his methodical approach. The weight of his brushstrokes gives the image an almost naive quality. The painting itself becomes a record of his labor, as though the very act of applying paint was as important to him as the finished scene. It's tempting to see Rousseau's humble materials and painstaking process as a statement against the fast-paced industrialization of his era. The painting invites us to appreciate the beauty of the everyday and the value of slow, careful creation. By understanding the materials and the labor involved, we can look beyond the surface of Rousseau's work, and see it as a testament to the power of individual expression, irrespective of artistic conventions.