PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Barnes Foundation presents Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets, a landmark exhibition of paintings by the self-taught artist Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), featuring works from the Barnes collection and museums around the world.

With 18 paintings by Rousseau, the Barnes is home to the world’s largest collection of works by the artist, and the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, with 11, is home to the second largest collection. This exhibition brings together these important collections, providing an unprecedented opportunity to see works that the French art dealer Paul Guillaume either owned—now in the Orangerie’s collection—or sold to Dr. Barnes. Some of these paintings have been reunited for the first time in more than 100 years, while others have never been exhibited together.

Co-curated by Christopher Green, consulting curator, professor emeritus at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and Nancy Ireson, Deputy Director for Collections and Exhibitions & Gund Family Chief Curator at the Barnes, with the support of Juliette Degennes, curator at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets is on view in the Roberts Gallery from October 19, 2025, through February 22, 2026.

Exceptional loans from major museums, including The Sleeping Gypsy from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, make this exhibition the most significant presentation of Rousseau’s work in decades. With nearly 60 works on view, it is also the largest US presentation of his art since 2006. For the first time ever, three of Rousseau’s major works appear in the same space: The Sleeping Gypsy (1897, MoMA), Unpleasant Surprise (1899–1901, the Barnes), and The Snake Charmer (1907, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Not even the artist himself witnessed this grouping, since by the time he made The Snake Charmer, The Sleeping Gypsy was no longer in his possession.

Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets offers a unique opportunity to learn more about one of the most popular, yet least understood, modern artists. New technical study of the Rousseau works at the Barnes has provided fresh insight into how and why the artist painted in such a distinctive way. In close collaboration with Christopher Green, the Barnes’s conservation team has transformed our understanding of Rousseau’s approach. This in-depth research—conducted between 2021 and 2024—resulted in many discoveries, including five underlying paintings, eight reworked compositions, and revised dating of five paintings. Green proposed, and exacting conservation work confirmed, that two seemingly unrelated paintings were created simultaneously by Rousseau as part of a competition to decorate a town hall in the suburbs of Paris.

The exhibition and accompanying catalogue invite visitors to look beyond the myths that surrounded Rousseau after his death—when many critics characterized the painter as naive and uneducated—to discover an artist who engaged with modern life and thought deeply about what might appeal to potential buyers. Themes of the exhibition include “Capturing Community,” which highlights Rousseau’s paintings for and of his neighbors, who held jobs as small business owners, shopkeepers, and clerks, and “Playing to the Crowd,” a spectacular selection of jungle paintings from his later years, when he was celebrated by progressive painters in Paris and beyond. These themes and more are explored in greater detail in the catalogue’s essays, by Ireson, Degennes, and Martha Lucy, deputy director for research, interpretation and education at the Barnes.

“Dr. Barnes’s lasting fascination with the work of Henri Rousseau compelled him to purchase 18 paintings by the artist between 1923 and 1929, making ours the largest collection of Rousseau paintings in the world,” says Thom Collins, Neubauer Family Executive Director and President of the Barnes. “We are proud to partner with the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, on this landmark exhibition, which brings works from the two preeminent Rousseau collections together for the first time, alongside important paintings from around the world. Reflecting the expansion of the Barnes’s educational program and emphasizing the historical and cultural context of individual works of art, A Painter’s Secrets will delight amateurs and experts alike. With technical study as a cornerstone of the project, the Barnes once again demonstrates its commitment to conservation research. We are thrilled to share new discoveries about Rousseau’s work and practice with an international audience.”

Rousseau, though ridiculed by critics during his lifetime, was eventually lauded as a self-taught genius, and his work influenced many avant-garde artists. His biography reveals that he was not afraid to take risks. He held a position in the French civil service, in a role that imposed tariffs on goods entering Paris. He began making art while on the job and left his position in 1893 at age 51 to pursue a career as a professional artist. With a modest pension for income, he sought a market for his art, working in different genres and soliciting a variety of patrons in his quest to make a living. He experimented with subject matter over time: jungle scenes—which he created by studying the plants and taxidermied animals in Paris’s natural history museums—landscapes, portraits, and still lifes.

Rousseau’s life was full of contradictions: he was a firm believer in the secular French state who followed Spiritualism, and a convicted fraudster who—when it suited his purposes—was happy to play the innocent. Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets considers how the artist’s paradoxical life shaped his art and practice to reveal an artist who responded to the world around him in the hope of furthering his career. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue reveal the tensions in his life and emphasize the equally inconsistent qualities of his painting style. This project considers his novel practice and examines how he created a memorable, and often fabricated, image of himself. It also reveals how he painted with viewers in mind, changing his works and his story to suit their preferences.

“We hope that visitors will gain a rich understanding of Henri Rousseau as an artist through exploring the exhibition’s thematic sections, each of which illuminates a different facet of his complex and fascinating story,” say Green and Ireson. “We invite visitors to enjoy the artist’s enigmatic paintings, while considering their meaning in the light of his personal story. We are particularly excited to bring together three paintings for the very first time: The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), Unpleasant Surprise (1899–1901), and The Snake Charmer (1907). This grouping brings to light how successfully Rousseau and his paintings have kept their secrets and points to how the artist became a major figure in the history of modernism.”

Notably, Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets marks the first occasion works from the Barnes collection will be shown in a monographic exhibition. Creating space for new conversations between works—a critical aspect of education, research, and public access—the exhibition provides visitors a rare opportunity to temporarily experience Rousseau paintings from the Barnes alongside works from esteemed institutional and private collections around the world. Following its opening at the Barnes, the exhibition will travel to the Musée de l’Orangerie in 2026, marking the first time paintings from the Barnes collection will be presented at another institution in almost 40 years.

The exhibition features 55 paintings and one lithograph, from the Barnes, the Musée de l’Orangerie, and more than 20 collections from cities around the world, including Chicago, London, New York, Switzerland, and Tokyo. Exhibition highlights include:

• The Sleeping Gypsy (La bohémienne endormie) (1897), on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This major canvas of a sleeping woman, a lion, and a mandolin in a moonlit desert landscape has not been exhibited outside MoMA for decades.

• The Past and the Present, or Philosophical Thought (Le passé et le présent, ou Pensée philosophique) (1899), from the Barnes collection, depicts the artist and his second wife on their wedding day. Images of the couple’s deceased spouses float above their heads, as if to bless the union. Rousseau often posed his subjects outdoors, surrounded by plants—both real and imagined. The term he coined for this genre was “portrait-landscapes.”

• The Snake Charmer (La charmeuse de serpents) (1907), from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, was Rousseau’s first large commission and was exhibited at the 1907 Salon d'Automne.

• Scouts Attacked by a Tiger (Éclaireurs attaqués par un tigre) (1904), from the Barnes collection, was painted during the French colonial period, when such works were popular with Parisian audiences for their theatrical presentation of faraway territories.

Henri Rousseau (French, 1844–1910) produced some of the most original and recognizable artworks of the modern era. A self-taught artist who began painting later in life, Rousseau had a unique vision that is perhaps best exemplified in his jungle scenes. These captivating tableaux, based largely on visits to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, are vivid, lush, and often unsettling in the exoticism of the imaginary worlds they portray. Rousseau’s visual world was influenced by everything he encountered, from postcards and early cinema to everyday scenes in the streets and parks of Paris. He was celebrated during his lifetime by Pablo Picasso and other modernist contemporaries who recognized his contribution in opening up new realms of artistic possibility. Adapted from Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris (New York: Abrams, 2006)