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  • Essay / Henri Rousseau's Women Walking in an Exotic Forest: A Metaphor or Self-Explanation

    Art has many different forms and styles, all unique to the artist who holds his chosen medium on the canvas. In the painting Women Walking in an Exotic Forest by Henri Rousseau, there can be multiple interpretations of the image, due to first glance and after doing research. The image can be seen as a metaphor for the world, but there is a much simpler reason for the painting: say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get an original essayThe interpretation that is perceived as a metaphor is due to the fact that the style of the painting has many small details, probably missed, which can explain the whole meaning behind the image. The painting depicts a young girl in a pale pink dress, standing behind enlarged trees and flowers. Look at the boldness of the lines, they are not thin but thick and it gives the painting the ability to belong in a children's story book. However, due to the complexity of the lines, their boldness allows them to serve a different purpose, and the other details of the paintings contribute to this separation from the children's storybook. The detail that easily goes unnoticed is that all the plants around the women are abnormally larger than they necessarily should be; the proportions do not conform to reality. These are the proportions because the woman is supposed to appear small, even being the central point of the painting; it's supposed to make her seem out of place. The flowers are bigger than her and the leaves block part of her, this metaphorically means that in such a big world, a small person seems irrelevant. The painting actually wouldn't fit in a children's storybook, because it's not necessarily "sad", but it's not exactly "happy" either. The painting evokes a feeling of insignificance, Rousseau intentionally made the plants unusually large, because the woman is looking at the world and if people don't look closely enough, she is easily overlooked. However, by researching the artist Henri Rousseau and him as a primitive painter, brings a different interpretation of Women Walking in an Exotic Forest. Rousseau is a primitive artist who constantly believes in the life of the “noble savage”. Rousseau did not like to enjoy the city life, he liked the "wild" lifestyle because they did not care about fashion, did not work to the point of exhaustion and basically lived a simple lifestyle at the daily. Rousseau had many reasons similar to those of Paul Gauguin for being a primitivist artist. Gauguin did not like Paris and considered it gray, dirty, where no one was together, he liked the way the people of Tahiti lived. Gauguin saw “a civilization from which (people) suffer”. A barbarism which is a rejuvenation.” Rousseau relates to this statement because he stopped earning a living at the age of forty-nine, to become a full-time painter. He didn't care about being part of city life or having responsibilities, because all he wanted to do was paint jungles and forests. He delved so deep into his life as a painter that his two surviving children had to be cared for by their aunt and uncle, as Rousseau neglected them for a single life. Rousseau is considered a primitivist artist because he did not paint modernity, but he painted simple things, and not necessarily considered sophisticated. The painting of Women Walking in an Exotic Forest presents this type of simplicity, it is.