Rare Vintage Henri Rousseau "The Poet and His Muse" Art Print

The Muse Inspiring the Poet is a 1909 oil-on-canvas painting by the French artist Henri Rousseau, forming a double portrait of Marie Laurencin and Guillaume Apollinaire. Owned for a time by Paul Rosenberg, it is now in the Kunstmuseum Basel. Another version of the work is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

A rough translation from the 1940s German commentary: "Guillaume de Kostrowitsky (called Apollinaire), born in 1880, this very advanced poet-spire has, as before him, taken on Zola and Baudelaire, the modern painting of his age group; he was the lawyer of the Fauves, the Cubists, a Picasso and Braque, a Delaunay and still the Futurists. Henri Rousseau was 35 years older, but he only became visible in the nineties, and so he also counted as a young generation. Apollinaire discovered in him, the neighbor, the same values that he had found in the distant exotics. Apollinaire's muse was the later famous painter Marie Laurencin, a delicate, sophisticated woman who developed a special feminine touch on the edge of Cubism in her art.

Our painter has now celebrated these two personalities in his own way. With an old-fashioned emblem: he with scroll and huge goose feather, she with evocatively raised right hand, as on a monument of the past. Apollinaire looks like a small commis voyageur; the Laurencin in her reform dress is degraded to a underlayed matron. All this appeals, who could deny it, to laugh, especially since the couple appears in the middle of such a solemnly meant natural backdrop with their youthful flowers and the park.

Nevertheless, one can also very much love this picture, whose simple Biedermeier also makes you think of the old and the oldest. The involuntarily funny resigns. The seriousness of a big, old child triumphs."

Commentary on the work circa 1950s: "This is the famous double portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin. Apollinaire has told us how the Douanier measured his nose, eyes, in fact all his features, with a tailor's measuring tape, and transferred these measurements with scrupulous exactitude onto the canvas. But, with all its stiffness and solemnity, how noble is the composition of this picture! In his work allegory does not pander to the conventions of academic, classical art. He treats it as it was treated in the illuminations of medieval manuscripts. Even the upraised fingers of our Muse call irresistibly to mind the Byzantine gesture of a Christ Pantocrator."

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau (1844-1910) was a French post-impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier, a humorous description of his occupation as a toll and tax collector.