Born in provincial northwest France, Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) worked as a bureaucrat in the outskirts of Paris, earning him the nickname le douanier (the customs agent), while teaching himself to paint as a hobby. He began exhibiting his paintings in 1886 at the Salon des Indépendants, an annual exhibition established by painters who were refused entry to the Royal Academy’s official Salon. In 1893 Rousseau was able to retire and devote himself to painting full-time, and by the beginning of the 20th century, his self-taught painting techniques and stylized, fantastical images brought him recognition from avant-garde artists and writers like Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, and Pablo Picasso.
In this diminutive painting, a man’s hand with thumb and forefinger extended, holds forth a small bouquet of roses. An inscription below reads “Bonne Fête,” the proper French salutation for the celebration of a feast or saint’s day. Rousseau probably intended the work, originally completed on a sheet of paperboard, to be an ephemeral gift for a friend in recognition of this annual occasion. The remainder of the inscription, “15 Aout 92" (“August 15, 1892”), provides a clue to this person’s identity. August 15 is the Feast Day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and thus the saint’s day of a person named Mary, or Marie in French. It is believed that Rousseau completed Bonne fête as a gift for Marie Biche-Foucher, whom he befriended around 1885. The painting was later mounted to a wooden panel. This treatment protected the fragile work from bending and creasing, but obscured the verso of the composition, which may have contained Rousseau’s message to, and possibly the name of, its recipient.
