The Muse: Moscow Version

Marie Laurencin raises her hand beneath a canopy of leaves. Beside her, Guillaume Apollinaire holds an enormous white quill and a roll of paper, his dark suit setting off her broad purple gown. A row of flowers stands between the couple and the viewer. Henri Rousseau’s The Muse Inspiring the Poet turns two artist friends into solemn inhabitants of an imagined garden. This first version, now in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum, is an oil painting on canvas dated 1909, measuring 131 × 97 cm.^[1]

Two Artists Become Poet and Muse

The painting begins with a friendship. Apollinaire, a poet and art critic, became an enthusiastic supporter of Rousseau, writing about him during his lifetime and after his death. Laurencin was a painter and Apollinaire’s companion. Rousseau brought them together in a double portrait, giving the poet the tools of his profession and transforming the painter into the figure named in the title.^[12] Her occupation matters: both people standing in the garden helped make modern art, though the picture assigns them different roles.

Laurencin occupies a great expanse of the canvas. Her gown spreads from shoulder to hem in long purple folds; her raised arm makes her silhouette wider still. The flower garland surrounding her face extends down towards her neck, where a dark bloom draws the eye. The Pushkin’s historical commentary interprets the dress as an antique peplos, appropriate to her role as an inspiring muse.^[13] The falling fabric gives her a monumental presence beside the close fit of Apollinaire’s jacket and trousers.

Their faces establish an uneven exchange. Laurencin looks out towards us. Apollinaire turns his face towards her, as if his attention has been caught by the gesture above his shoulder. His lowered hands carry the quill and rolled paper; hers rises into the leaves. The contrasting gestures let the idea of inspiration become visible without showing a poem being written. We can read her hand as an address or a blessing, while leaving its exact meaning open.

The hands themselves are conspicuous. Apollinaire’s long fingers, the feather’s white blade and the pale cylinder of paper form a little sequence of light against his clothes. These objects are readable from a distance. The poet appears dressed for a formal occasion, yet his writing equipment seems to have grown to the scale of an emblem. His black figure anchors the right side; Laurencin’s coloured gown fills the left. Both have the stillness of people placed carefully for a ceremonial portrait.^[1]

Michel Hoog’s catalogue essay records a story about Laurencin’s objection to the substantial figure Rousseau had given her. The painter supposedly answered that a great poet required a correspondingly large muse. The anecdote may catch the humorous side of this imposing image, but it comes to us as a reported exchange. It cannot establish exactly what Rousseau said or why he chose these proportions.^[12] The painting offers firmer ground: Laurencin’s breadth and lifted arm make her the more commanding presence.

A Portrait Held Inside a Garden

Rousseau called such works portraits in a landscape and claimed to have invented the genre. The Musée de l’Orangerie places that claim within his ambition to give background details a role in identifying and honouring his sitters. It also points to earlier Italian and Flemish portraits among the traditions he encountered at the Louvre.^[14] His claim belongs to his lively presentation of himself as an artist; portraiture had, of course, included landscapes long before him.

Here the setting works as a frame within the painted rectangle. Dark trunks rise close to the sides, their branches reaching across the pair. Behind Laurencin, broad leaves crowd around her head and arm. Above Apollinaire, slender, divided fronds open into small patches of pale sky. Although the garden looks densely grown, its foliage remains remarkably legible. Individual leaves keep their outlines, and overlapping groups retain their distinct shapes. The Pushkin’s detailed commentary draws attention to this separation of one leaf from another.^[15]

The difference between the figures and their surroundings is especially absorbing. A person’s body disappears beneath clothing, but a leaf declares its whole shape. The long pleats in the purple dress give us a repeated downward rhythm; the branches turn that rhythm outwards and upwards. At the lower edge, pale stems rise from the green ground, divide into narrow leaves, and finish in red or pink heads. They are so evenly spaced that each plant seems to have been given its own position in a procession.^[1]

These flowers interrupt our imagined approach to the couple. Their stems cross the lower parts of the figures, while their rounded heads form a loose line in front of the knees. Behind the pair, another layer of greenery closes the view. We are allowed to look closely, but there is little sense of a path leading through this enclosure. The garden gathers attention around the two standing people.

Its point of departure was a real Parisian place. In a letter of 31 August 1908 reproduced in Hoog’s account, Rousseau told Apollinaire that he was working on a background in the Luxembourg Gardens, where he had found a “very poetic little nook.”^[12] The phrase connects the observed city with the painting’s cultivated fantasy. The resulting garden need not be a topographical record to preserve Rousseau’s wish to find an appropriate setting for his friends. The compact enclosure also gives this work a different pace from the expansive spectacle of The Dream: its drama remains concentrated in a gesture, a glance and the space between two figures.

Letters, Delayed Sittings and a Price Between Friends

The project was already under discussion in Rousseau’s letters during the middle of 1908. Those letters, published after his death and quoted in Hoog’s study, follow the practical difficulties of bringing the portrait into existence. Arranged sittings slipped from week to week. Rousseau could continue with the garden and the dress while waiting for the people who were to occupy them.^[12]

On 27 December 1908 he was still asking Apollinaire to persuade Laurencin to pose at least once. The request gives the broad gown and commanding figure a more complicated history than their apparent certainty suggests. A finished portrait can present its sitters as permanently available to the painter; the correspondence reveals how much of the work proceeded around their absence.^[12]

Apollinaire later recalled Rousseau measuring his face, hands and body, then reducing those measurements to fit the canvas. He also remembered being entertained with songs from the painter’s youth while he posed. Hoog reproduces this recollection alongside the letters.^[12] It offers a vivid picture of Rousseau’s patient seriousness and sociability. Measurements, however, could not determine the final character of the image: scale, costume, objects and vegetation all contribute to the public identities he constructed for his friends.

Money became an increasingly pressing part of the correspondence. On 17 March 1909, close to the deadline for submissions to the Salon des Indépendants, Rousseau asked Apollinaire to send something towards the work as the frames were due to arrive. On 28 April, near the exhibition’s end, he made the request more definite. He explained that he had told people the portrait cost 300 francs, a “price between friends.”^[12] These appeals show a painter trying to turn affection and labour into payment. They do not establish that the poet paid the requested sum.

The first version appeared at the Salon des Indépendants in 1909. The Pushkin’s exhibition account describes ridicule directed at the portrait and says that Apollinaire rejected the likeness and did not buy it.^[16] His discomfort belongs alongside his admiration for Rousseau. A critic might champion a painter’s independence and still find it difficult to accept the image that painter made of him. The emphatic features, large hands and solemn stance leave little room for the sitter to control his appearance.

The correspondence soon turns towards another canvas. By 31 May 1909 Rousseau was discussing the second version, now in Basel.^[12] The sequence explains why a project that began in 1908 produces two paintings associated with 1909. The Pushkin’s current catalogue dates its own canvas 1909, while the 1985 catalogue caption gives the broader span 1908–09.^[1][12]

Why the Flowers Changed

Apollinaire supplied the best-known explanation for the second painting. In the account quoted by Hoog, he said Rousseau had first painted stocks and then corrected the choice in another portrait with sweet william. The French name for sweet william, œillets de poète, gives the flower an obvious verbal connection with the poet.^[12] The story makes the foreground part of the exchange between painter and sitter: Apollinaire had ideas about how his poetic identity should be represented, down to the plants at his feet.

The flowers have also attracted more elaborate symbolic readings. The Pushkin’s historical catalogue interprets them as an image of the poet’s immortal soul. Its separate detailed commentary links the first flowers with inward passion, then presents their supposed association with death as a reason for replacement.^[13][15] These are ways of interpreting the garden, rather than a fixed botanical key that unlocks every part of the painting. The flower names themselves vary between accounts.

Hoog also suggests a practical possibility: Rousseau needed money and may have found a buyer for the first version, presumed to be Ambroise Vollard. That explanation could coexist with the poet’s dissatisfaction over the flowers.^[12] A new canvas offered scope to alter several things at once. Looking at the two pictures, we can see changes in faces, figure proportions, branches and the distribution of sky as well as the foreground blossoms.

From Paris to Shchukin’s Moscow

The first picture’s subsequent life took it away from the friends it commemorated. The Pushkin’s historical provenance records Vollard buying it from Rousseau in 1909 for 300 francs. This is a recorded sale to a dealer, distinct from the sum requested from Apollinaire in the letters. Sergei Shchukin subsequently acquired the painting from Vollard.^[13]

The exact year of Shchukin’s purchase differs between the museum’s accounts. The older provenance tentatively gives 1910; the later text for the exhibition Shchukin: Biography of a Collection gives 1912.^[13][16] Both place the canvas in the same collecting history. By January 1913 Shchukin lent it to the Jack of Diamonds exhibition in Moscow, where, according to the later account, it drew a mixed response.^[16] The portrait had entered another city’s arguments about modern painting.

That loan gives the work a history beyond its intimate Parisian beginnings. Viewers in Moscow encountered the monumental couple and their strange garden as a public exhibition picture. Its journey helps explain how a work rooted in personal relations could become available to a much broader audience.

The museum’s historical provenance places the canvas in Shchukin’s collection until 1918, then in the First Museum of New Western Painting, and from 1923 in the State Museum of New Western Art. It entered the Pushkin in 1948, a date confirmed by the current collection record.^[13][1] These changes of custody belong to this first version. The second painting followed a separate European route.

Comparing the Pushkin and Basel Paintings

The Basel version of The Muse Inspiring the Poet is a distinct oil painting, also dated 1909. At 146.2 × 96.9 cm, it is taller than the Pushkin canvas while remaining almost the same width.^[17] That difference matters to the composition. The pair stands more compactly within the narrow frame, and Apollinaire faces us more directly. Laurencin’s relative breadth is reduced. Above them the branches make a more angular pattern, while larger openings reveal the sky.

In Moscow, the pale, separated stems form an orderly fringe before the dark figures. In Basel, fuller leafy plants and flower heads in red, pink and white build a busier foreground. The repeated subject lets us see Rousseau reconsidering the balance of people and plants. The Pushkin picture retains the particularly arresting relationship between Laurencin’s outward gaze and Apollinaire’s turn towards her: an encounter held still, beneath leaves that seem to give every inch of it their attention.^[1][17]