 Hello and welcome to Barns Takeout. My name is Nancy Eisen. I'm the Gund family chief curator at the foundation and today I'm going to talk to you about a painting by one of my favorite artists the French artist Henri Rousseau who if you've been tuning in you'll know that I have a particularly soft spot for. Now the picture that we're going to look at today is in gallery 19 of the Barns Foundation so we're upstairs and it's a picture on the right-hand side of the wall so here we are looking at the north wall in room 19 and we can see in the center there there's this huge painting by Matisse on either end of the wall we have pictures by Soutine which just balance each other out and in terms of the format the painting that we're going to look at is too in from the end of the right-hand side of the wall so I hope that you can follow where I'm going. I am going to zoom in now just so that you can see where my attentions are. It's actually quite a small picture and it's called the past and the present and it was made by Rousseau in 1899. Let's just look a little more closely. Now what can we see? We see a couple very smartly dressed in a pastoral setting and above them in the clouds we see two further heads. Why an Earth might we wonder are there two little heads in the clouds and if we look very closely we can see that they are distinctly portraits. The figures have different colored hair to the figures below them they have different colored eyes so there's definitely a sense of real people here and here let's just have a look while we're at it at how Rousseau paints. We can see some of the little revisions he's made we can see for instance how he's changed the shapes of the heads of the two sitters. We can see how carefully he delineates the leaves of the trees and look you can almost see the various individual brush strokes there as he's pulling that quite dry paint across the canvas. But what does all of this mean? And if you're a little bit puzzled you're in good company because a very important critic a man called Arsène Alexandre went to visit Rousseau in his studio in 1910. So in March 1910 Arsène Alexandre finds himself in Rousseau's studio which is in a not very fashionable part of Paris a place called Mont Rouge which is a sort of almost villagey kind of place in Paris it's on the outskirts of the city and he finds this painting and Rousseau sees Alexandre looking at it and Rousseau says to the critic it's a philosophical painting it's a little bit spiritualist isn't it? Now what did Rousseau mean when he told the critic that this painting was a little bit spiritualist? To understand it we have to know a little bit about Rousseau and his lives and his beliefs. People that knew Rousseau said that he believed in ghosts. One of his friends the art dealer Wilhelm Uder wrote in 1910 that a person observing Rousseau once looked at him painting and saw a very strange expression on his face and Rousseau when asked about this said well that's quite natural because it was my late wife who was guiding my brush. So Rousseau had a very distinct belief in the afterlife or an afterlife of sorts and in ghosts and in spirits and this for some people made him a figure of fun but it really wasn't that unusual at the turn of the century for somebody in creative circles to be interested in spiritualism and this is what we have a sense of here is that Rousseau although he was a Republican he was very dedicated to France which at that time was a secular state he was also interested in spirits. He makes this painting in 1899 and one of the other things that happens in that year is that he gets married he gets married to for a second time. So Rousseau had actually been married as a young man he had married a woman called Clemence Butteau in 1868 and Henri Rousseau and Clemence Butteau had been married for 20 years and when sadly she she passed away. 10 years later Rousseau marries again he marries a widow called Josephine Norris and what we see here is a painting that celebrates that new match. We have Rousseau, Henri Rousseau and Josephine here together and obviously very much in love holding a little bunch of flowers there but above them we see their former spouses. We have Josephine Norris husband in the clouds and then we have Clemence Butteau looking down at Rousseau. Rousseau here is giving us a self-portrait of himself with a moustache very smartly dressed and the couple are giving us the impression that their former loves are approving of this new union. Now the format that the painting takes of a portrait with portraits above it is one that was quite typical in photography at the time. There was a trend of photography in the 1890s which we now call spirit photography where sitters would pay to have their pictures taken and actually believed that the photography this new medium could show spirits above them that the actual process of photography was capturing those images. Now the photographer who was famous for this genre of photography man called Bougé was actually exposed as being fraud. What he was doing was using photographic techniques to superimpose images of the sea spouses onto works or of loved ones who had passed onto onto photographs but at this point it did seem to be a very fashionable way of commemorating people and of basically showing that they were still part of life and so Rousseau here is giving us a sense that this is something that he adhered to. I personally think it's a wonderful painting. It really does give us a sense of life going on but also of the past being respected. Rousseau does this in his very ecstatic very individual way but how wonderful to have all of this told to us in a painting. The fact that this was in Rousseau studio in 1910 means that it was a picture that he kept. It wasn't something that he'd sold or given away. It was obviously something that mattered to him and I'm very pleased that us and Alexandre was able to see it and to recognise it as something special at the time. When you're back at the Barnes Foundation please do look it out. It's a small picture so if you're not looking you might miss it but it really is worth a visit and until then do take care and please tune in for Barnes to take out tomorrow. All the best. Bye bye. I hope you enjoyed Barnes Takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.