Landscape with Milkmaids (View of Brittany)

The son of a tinsmith, Henri Rousseau was born on May 21,1844 in Laval, in the northwest of France. He had little or no formal education as an artist.
Rousseau’s landscape shows a grazing scene with three milkmaids and four animals under large trees. To the right of the gazing area is a gate. The women all wear similar garb: blue skirts, black weskits over white blouses, and white head coverings. The woman in the distance, at the left, carries a pail; the woman closest to the foreground of the painting, in the center, appears to be carrying a sort of hoop with a jug, perhaps another milk container. The horizon line is low, with large trees in the center ground filling the sky above. Perspective is resolved by planes laid out from foreground to background parallel to the width of the canvas. This country scene expresses Rousseau’s typical sense of prevailing harmony between humanity and nature. Simple, dreamlike, and idyllic, both natural elements and figures are highly stylized. Green dominates, with touches of light blue, black, white, gray, and brown tones. The style in this painting is the forerunner of the even more dreamlike vegetation and foliage that he developed in his exotic jungle pictures. In that regard, the painting represents the beginning of his unwavering confidence in the self-taught course he chose to follow.