Henry Rousseau Project

The Waterfall
Project
Henri Rousseau

Volunteer:
Date:
Grade Level:			2nd Grade
Artist:			Henri Rousseau
Print Sculpture:			The Waterfall
Art Vocabulary:			Foreground Middleground Background Naive or Primitive Art: untutored, simple. The naive elements in Rousseau’s pictures include: a flat surface, no perspective; distorted unrealistic proportions; simple shapes; delight in decoration for its own sake; stillness of the characters and their environment. Douanier: A customs officer in France

I	The Artist:
	Henri Rousseau attracted the Parisian avant-garde’s attention at the 1886 Salon des Indépendants. Throughout his life he was ridiculed by public and critics, but leading writers and artists sought out the self-taught painter’s freshness of vision. In 1885 he quit his job as a customs inspector, or douanier, to pursue painting full-time. Though he claimed to have served in the army in Mexico, scholars have found no proof of this. His imagination made exotic landscapes out of Paris’s botanical gardens and wild beasts out of toys and photographs.
	Like other Naive painters, Rousseau used a simplifying style, non-scientific perspective, and bright colors. His particular gifts were a sensitivity to color harmonies and knowing how to subordinate parts of the canvas to the rhythm of the whole. He painted still lifes; elaborate allegories; exotic, rural, and modern urban landscapes; portraits; and enigmatic studies of children. His compositions sometimes seem to be subconscious visions; in this aspect, he anticipated the Surrealists. Rousseau maintained an art school, where he taught painting, diction, and music. He also wrote three plays.
	Rousseau had no hesitation in claiming for himself a place at the forefront of painting. He once remarked to his admirer Pablo Picasso, who was then borrowing heavily from African art, that they were the only great contemporary artists: "I in the modern manner and you in the Egyptian."
II	The Painting: The Waterfall
	What do you see in the picture? We see two antelopes, or other exotic, long-horned animals, wading in a brook, and two black men, on apparently leaning against a pile of rocks while the other is hidden in the tall grass. But most prominently we see a forest of tall trees and plants.
	Where does the scene take place? In a public park? It takes place in a jungle such as we have never seen in a National Geographic show or even in a Disney movie. A truly fantastic place.
	What kinds of plants do you see in the painting? Do they grow in Riverside? Where do you think they might grow? We are told that the painter of the picture, Henri Rousseau, used to go to the botanical gardens and the zoo in Paris to study plants and animals from far away countries. He himself almost never left Paris. He also fed his imagination on the pictures from magazines, almanacs, encyclopedias, and books of botany or zoology. (Show a few plates from botanical books: Note that the details are magnified, and that the plants are shown out of their natural context so that their shapes, however, simple, appear more striking.)
	Rousseau’s trees and flowers have that same quality of natural objects taken out of context. They are like nothing anyone has ever seen. The trees look like overgrown branches, as if the artist had studied a twig and enlarged it many times under a magnifying lens. The leaves are huge, bigger than those of the catalpa tree, and the blades of grass are very tall and wide.
	What are the colors of the foliage and the flowers? The foliage is painted in bright deep greens and a few paler shades of green. There are some pale-looking blooms in the background, a few pink flowers in the middleground, and bright red ferns in the foreground. There is a progression here from the paler colors to the brighter colors. The effect is to draw you eyes to the right side of the picture which contrasts with the darker left side of the picture with the men and rocks.
	Have you ever seen foliage as red as the ferns in the foreground? In the fall, yes. The red sumacs for instance are a bright red, so are the leaves of the maple trees in October. But ferns do not grow red in the middle of a tropical summer.
	What do you make of the triangular foliage in the middleground? Are those five triangular arrangements of blades fantastic plants with a sort of aigrette at the top, or are they huts made of branches? Is this foliage for the natives in the painting?
	Let’s consider the characters in the painting for a while. What do you notice about them? Compared to the trees around them, they are very, very small.
	Have you ever seen a movie in which the characters had been shrunk to a very small size? How about the movie "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids!" for example? The animals and human beings in Rousseau’s painting appear as miniatures in an overgrown garden. Like "Alice in Wonderland" surrounded by huge threatening flowers, or Tom Thumb, so tiny that he would hide inside a pocket. Seen from the reduced perspective of Tom Thumb or Alice, the natural world becomes a very unfamiliar place.
	What kind of day is it in the picture? How can you tell? It is a very warm day – the people and the animals seek the coolness of water.
	What title would you give this painting? Henry Rousseau called it The Waterfall.
	Can you see a waterfall? Why did Rousseau call his picture "The Waterfall?" It is strange that the waterfall should give its name to the picture when it is so small, barely noticeable. However, it is very important to the whole picture, for without water, the luxuriant vegetation around it would not exist and the heat of the day would not be bearable.
	Can you see the top of the waterfall? Does it look like other waterfalls you have seen? In Rousseau’s picture, how did the water get to the top of the rocks? This is no mountain, just a pile of rocks, not even five feet high, to judge by the man who stands close to it. You would normally expect the water to spring from a crack at the bottom of the rocks. The flow of the water also follows a very unnatural linear path. It does not look like a real waterfall at all! The picture has the quality of a dream world, familiar and yet fantastic.
	Is this a noisy picture? No, the only sound you would hear is the murmur of the water; the waterfall being so small cannot possibly create a roar. There is no rustling of the leaves, no motion at all in the foliage. The only thing that moves is the water.
	Are the animals afraid of the men? Not at all. Everything in the picture is peace and harmony.
	Would you like to be able to step into the picture? If you could enter the picture, what you enjoy doing in it?
III	Composition of Artwork
	Oil on canvas
IV	Students’ Self-Expression: Guided Activity
	A.	Create a jungle scene using different shapes of leaves and grasses from green construction paper (various shades), as well as jungle animal photos (cut out from National Geographic Magazine). The children each picked an animal, then assembled their own jungle scene using the "leaves" and "grass" as the background. They could draw and/or glue the pieces onto green construction paper. Materials: Gluesticks, pre-cut green shapes and animal photos, construction paper
	B.	Prepare a large background of jungle foliage and staple it to a bulletin board. Ask the children to populate that jungle with their own wild animals and people. Cut out the children’s pictures and staple them to the board to create a scene.
	C.	Ask the children to drawn their own picture of an enchanted forest.
	D.	Feltboard Landscape: This is a project based on the works of naive master Henri Rousseau. When introducing other artists offer the children a chance to create a piece whose theme or technique was sensitive to that artists’ work.
		Rousseau’s wonderful paintings are delightful to introduce to the children. They are so richly interpretive and boldly colored that they appeal to the children’s love of fantasy. Speculate on the "missions and Motives" of the people and animals in the landscapes.
		Cut jungle animals and foliage ahead of time, rather than having the children do it, the fun will come from the cooperative effort of creating and re-creating a ‘movable scene’. Using 3 feltboards with cut-outs you can have groups of 4 or 5 children work together. They will probably produce wonderful stories of their works. They can experiment with scale, color, balance, etc.
	E.	Make up a story about the people and the animals in the painting. Make sure each child contributes something to the story in the way of action or added detail. Guide the children with questions and suggestions. Write their story as it develops. Leave a neatly printed copy of the story for the children to look at in the classroom.