Henri Rousseau – Rendezvous in the Forest, 1889 | Giclée Print

A wood of thin trees, drawn branch by branch, and somewhere near the middle of it two people kissing. He is in a tricorne hat and a dark braided coat, she is in a rose gown; a third small figure in green stands a step behind them. You can look at this picture for a while before you find them, and that is the picture.

He gave it to his baker. Washington’s provenance file for this canvas opens with a sentence you almost never see in a museum record: a gift from the artist to his baker, Paris, 1889. Rousseau was a customs officer painting in his free time, with no dealer and no money, and pictures went to the people he owed. It surfaced only decades later, when the Paris dealer Bela Hein sold it in 1931 to Marie and Averell Harriman in New York; it came to the National Gallery as their foundation’s gift in 1972.

An eighteenth-century subject, hidden. The costumes are not 1889. A tricorne and a wide rose gown put the couple in the world of the fête galante — the amorous meeting in a park that Watteau and his followers painted for a hundred years, always in the clear foreground, always the point of the picture. Rousseau moves them to the back of the wood and lets the trees have the canvas. What survives is the mood of the old subject and none of its manners.

Why it holds a wall. Rousseau built this the way he built the jungles twenty years later: flat layers, no aerial perspective, every branch and leaf drawn separately rather than suggested. Because these trees are half bare, you can watch the method with nothing hiding it — a lattice of several thousand strokes with a pale sky and one apricot cloud caught in it. From across a room it reads as a single dark green screen; up close it comes apart into drawing.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the National Gallery of Art’s own open-access photograph of the canvas. It is not a painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 92 × 73 cm — oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington
40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.45× original. Image 33.02 × 42.00 cm.
50 × 70 cm / 19.7 × 27.6 in — reduced, 0.58× original. Image 42.00 × 53.42 cm.

No crop. Rousseau painted to all four edges and the museum photographed the canvas edge to edge. We sampled twenty-five rows and columns in from each side of the file and found paint everywhere — never the flat, even studio grey a photographer’s backdrop leaves. So the file is printed whole; nothing has been trimmed and nothing added.

On the borders. On the small sheet the height binds at the house 84 %: the image is 42.00 cm tall, leaving 3.49 cm at each side, 3.72 above and 4.28 below. On the large sheet the width binds instead — the canvas is squarer than the paper — so 4.00 cm at the sides, 7.71 above and 8.87 below. Both sit at optical centre, 1:1.15, not in the middle.

Resolution. Washington’s file is 21,382 pixels across: 1645 dpi at the small size and 1293 at the large one. Both sheets are printed at our flat 300 dpi, the most that matte fine art paper resolves. At that floor the file would carry an image 181 cm wide. The sheet is the limit here, not the picture.

Provenance
Henri Rousseau (French, 1844–1910), Rendezvous in the Forest, 1889. Signed lower right: Henri Rousseau.
Oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the W. Averell Harriman Foundation in memory of Marie N. Harriman, acc. no. 1972.9.20.
A gift from the artist to his baker, Paris, 1889; Bela Hein, Paris; sold June 1931 to Marie N. and W. Averell Harriman, New York; W. Averell Harriman Foundation; gift to the National Gallery of Art, 1972.
Public domain. The museum publishes its photograph under its Open Access policy.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The colour of the museum’s file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger — how the file, not the sheet, sets the ceiling.