Walk in the Wood

Henri Rousseau's 'Walk in the Wood' (1886) is an early work by the great self-taught master, painted before he achieved even the limited recognition that came to him in the 1890s. Rousseau retired from his position as a customs officer (hence his nickname 'Le Douanier') in 1893 to paint full-time, but had been producing work since the early 1880s. His woodland scenes occupy a unique position in French painting — sharing a subject with the Barbizon and Impressionist traditions but rendered with his characteristic naive directness, the forest space constructed without academic perspective or Impressionist atmospheric dissolution.

Rousseau's woodland is built from individually rendered leaves and tree trunks, each element given equal attention in a way that defies conventional hierarchy of near and far, important and peripheral. His forest floor and sunlight-through-canopy effects are achieved through contrasts of light and dark without atmospheric softening. The figures in his woodland scenes are placed with the deliberateness of a painter for whom the human presence in nature is always slightly uncertain.