Henri Rousseau, l’ambition de la peinture

The Musée de l’Orangerie is organizing, in collaboration with the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, a monographic exhibition devoted to the painter Henri Rousseau, bringing together major loans from international institutions. This co-production will open in October 2025 in Philadelphia and will be shown at the Musée de l’Orangerie from 25 March to 20 July 2026.

On this occasion, the Musée de l’Orangerie will be the first to receive loans from the Barnes Foundation collection, uniquely reuniting a significant body of Rousseau’s works that once passed through the hands of the dealer Paul Guillaume. This collaboration is a natural fit in the histories of the two institutions: Paul Guillaume, whose collection forms the core of the Musée de l’Orangerie, acted as intermediary for Albert Barnes in the purchase of his eighteen Rousseau paintings. Guillaume himself was an ardent collector of the artist, reportedly owning up to fifty works by Rousseau, according to the documentary albums preserved in the museum’s archives. Nine of these now belong to the Musée de l’Orangerie’s collection, to which a recent acquisition of two small portraits has been added. The exhibition and its catalogue will retrace this close relationship between the Parisian dealer and the American collector, and more broadly examine the network of collectors and dealers in which the painter was positioned during his lifetime. Some fifty works will be presented, drawn from the collections of the two institutions and from key loans from European and American public collections, including The Sleeping Gypsy, a masterpiece from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The exhibition reviews the career of Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), his painting practice and his professional ambitions. Having come to Paris from his native Mayenne, he decided at the age of 49 to retire from his post as an octroi collector (a municipal tax collector) to devote himself entirely to painting. The artist diversified genres and techniques to carve out a place on the Parisian art scene: works submitted to the Salon des Indépendants, pieces produced in response to public commissions to decorate town halls in the Île-de-France region, portraits commissioned by his circle, landscapes intended for sale, and more intimate self-portraits. The exhibition aims to go beyond the myths surrounding the name “Le Douanier Rousseau” to study his artistic trajectory in depth. Thematic sections will address the materiality of the works and situate them within the context of the modern art market in which Paul Guillaume and Albert Barnes played an important role.

Bringing the two most important collections of the artist into dialogue with major works from international public collections is an opportunity to study a large corpus from the perspective of materiality. In this respect, recent scientific analyses carried out by the Barnes Foundation shed light on the artist’s painting practice. In parallel, the Orangerie’s collection has been examined by the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France (C2RMF) to complement this body of research. Within the exhibition route, a digital feature will highlight these scientific analyses, offering the public a more tangible engagement with the study of the works’ materiality and revealing Rousseau’s creative process.

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Exhibition organized by the Barnes Foundation and the Musée de l’Orangerie.
Presented at the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia) from 19 October 2025 to 22 February 2026.

Cover: Henri Rousseau, The Snake Charmer, 1907, Musée d'Orsay, Bequest of Jacques Doucet, 1936, © Musée d’Orsay, dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Patrice Schmidt

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