Philippe Rousseau
(Paris 1816 - Acquigny 1887)

Chacun Pour Soi
signed and dated in the lower left Ph. Rousseau 1864

oil on canvas

38 1/8×51 1/8 inches (97×130.5 cm.)

PROVENANCE:
Galerie Talabardon et Gautier, Paris Private collection, Paris

EXHIBITED Paris, Salon, 1865, no. 1879 This painting will be included in the forthcoming exhibition The Dog in Art from Renaissance to Post Modern, (working title) at the Bruce Museum of Arts & Science, Greenwich, Connecticut, May 13, 2006 - August 27, 2006 traveling to The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, October 1, 2006 - January 1, 2007.

LITERATURE Ronald de Leeuw, Philippe Rousseau 1816 - 1887, exhibition catalogue Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Waanders Uitgevers, Zwolle, 1993, p. 59, figure 60 Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Le Peintre et L’Animal en France au XIX Siecle, Les Editions de L’Amateur, 2001, p. 28, figure 19, illustrated in color.

Philippe Rousseau was regarded as one of the most popular artists of his day.1 A painter of animals and still lifes, he is best known for combining both in large formats to which he added anecdotal elements. He is believed to have studied with Antoine-Jean Baron Gros (1771 - 1835) and Victor Bertin (1767 - 1842). He began exhibiting at the Salon in 1834 and was admitted to the Légion d’Honneur in 1852. Prior to his induction, in 1850 Rousseau was awarded his first state commission requiring him to paint a scene of cats with a dog. His response was an extremely elegant interior depicting a long-haired feline, with one nursing and three frolicking kittens, rising ferociously from a satin-lined basket on an oriental rug by an elegantly carved table leg. She is protectecting her brood from a very sheepish looking affenpinscher who has hesitatingly entered through parted embroidered damask drapes onto an inlaid marble floor. In the foreground, completely unperturbed, a grey kitten sporting a pink bow delicately laps milk from a gold-edged porcelain bowl.

Entitled Un Importun (An Intruder), measuring 97×130.5 cm, it is of the same monumental scale as Chacun Pour Soi (Everyone for Himself). Well received at the time, it is a testimony to contemporary taste which reveled in the display of a surface richness that enveloped entire canvases. (2) Originally hung in the Palais du Luxembourg it is now in the collection of the Musée d’ Orsay, Paris.

Fourteen years later the impetus that led Philippe Rousseau to paint Un Importun would be turned inside out. From upstairs we have been sent below to the sordid kitchen of Chacun Pour Soi. Astride much humbler table legs a dog of indeterminate breed seeks scraps from dirty dishes in a basket while nursing two pups. Two others wrestle in a corner surrounded by turmoil. Discarded food, an overturned pot and used utensils litter the floor. Chaos has replaced order and it is indeed as the title states “everyone for himself”.

In the fourteen year interim between the two works, Rousseau had been exposed to Jean-Baptiste Chardin’s (1699 - 1779) beautifully rendered still lifes of everyday objects. From 1780 until 1846 Chardin had fallen into obscurity, only to be resurrected with the publication of the first scholarly book devoted to the artist by Pierre Hédouin. (3) The acceptance of humbler subject matter created a new artistic catalyst, which was further compounded by Gustave Courbet’s (1819 - 1877) doctrine of realism, that insisted upon painting scenes of ordinary life as a direct attack on the social and artistic hierarchies of the time, which shook all existing standards.(4) Given this atmosphere Rousseau could not have remained unaffected. While other animal painters chose to allude to class struggle via the confrontations of mixed and pure breeds on the streets of London and Paris (5), Rousseau in Chacun Pour Soi focused solely on the downtrodden’s struggle for survival.

It is a large step away from the “tempest in a teapot” of Un Importun and for the artist as well as the world, irreversible.

(1) Elizabeth Hardouin - Fugier & Etienne Grafe, “ Philippe Rousseau” in French Flower Painters of the 19th Century, Philip Wilson Publishers Limited, London, 1989, p. 347. (2) Robert Rosenblum & H. W. Janson, 19th Century Art, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1984, p. 249.

(3) Ronald de Leeuw, op. cit., 1993, p. 35.

(4) Robert Rosenblum & H. W. Janson, p. 243.

(5) Robert Rosenblum, The Dog in Art from Rococo to Post-Modernism, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1988, p. 45.

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