Hikers climbing up to a Mountain Chalet

Prints and Drawings

c. 1888

Henri Rousseau
French, 1844–1910

When Rousseau was a toll operator for one of Paris’s city gates, he made the decision to become an artist. With no academic training, he started copying works at the Musée du Louvre in 1884 and two years later exhibited his works with the Neo-Impressionists at the Salon des Indépendants. In this drawing Rousseau’s lack of formal training is evident in the flattened forms and odd spatial relations of the landscape. These idiosyncrasies would inspire artists such as Vasily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Prints and Drawings

Artist: Henri Rousseau
Title: Hikers climbing up to a Mountain Chalet
Place: France (Artist's nationality)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: Made 1883–1893
Medium: Black crayon, with graphite, heightened with white chalk and white pencil, on tan wove paper
Inscriptions: Signed recto, lower left, in black crayon: "H. Rousseau"
Dimensions: 38.9 × 31.8 cm (15 3/8 × 12 9/16 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of Dorothy Braude Edinburg to the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection
Reference Number: 2013.1018
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/186405/manifest.json

Henry Certigny, La Vérité sur le Douanier Rousseau (Lausanne, 1971), no. 21 (ill.).
Henry Certigny, Le Douanier Rousseau en Son Temps I (Tokyo, 1984), pp. 62–63, no. 32 (ill.).
Suzanne Folds McCullagh (ed.), Drawings in Dialogue: Old Master Through Modern, The Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection, exh. cat. (Chicago, 2006), pp. 132–133, cat. 93 (ill.).

Art Institute of Chicago, “Drawings in Dialogue: Old Master Through Modern, The Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection,” June 3–July 30, 2006, pp. 132-133, cat. 93 (ill.).
Art Institute of Chicago, “The Thrill of the Chase: Drawings for the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection,” Mar. 15-June 15, 2014, no cat.

Mme. Roman, Paris, before 1926; given to Mlle. Lucie Gorse (later Mme. Jean-Paul Cazard), between 1929 and 1933; by descent to the Cazard-Gorse family, to 2000 [according to Certigny 1984 and London 2000 auc. cat.]; sold, Christie’s, London, July 29, 2000, lot 520, to Dorothy Braude Edinburg, Brookline, MA; given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2013.

Certigny 32

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