One Fine Show: “Henri Rousseau, A Painter’s Secrets” at the Barnes Foundation

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

One of the more hilarious concepts invented by Gen-Z is that of “the body count,” a reliable vein of TikTok content fodder wherein people ask each other how many sexual partners they’ve had. Even leaving aside the connotation that having sex with someone is similar to killing them, it is wild to imply that any adult could or should keep track of that number. It reminds me of Martin Scorsese being explained the concept of a “sneaky link” by his 20-something daughter and shrugging, “We never used that term. We never saw specific people in my day.”

You have to wonder what Philadelphia Zoomers will make of Henri Rousseau’s The Past and the Present, or Philosophical Thought, which was painted in 1899 and celebrates his second marriage with images of both parties’ deceased spouses in the clouds above. The painting is featured in “Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets,” a new exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, which with 18 paintings, owns the world’s largest collection of works by the artist. The show pairs these with other significant loans for a total of 60 works, providing an authoritative introduction to this artist for those unfamiliar with his unique career.

Rousseau was a customs officer in Paris who only became an artist in his 40s; his work was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, where anyone who paid the entrance fee could display their work. But you can’t call him an outsider artist—not when his work was so in conversation with art history and so influential, especially on acquaintances like Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso. If you’ve been to the Museum of Modern Art in the last few years, you’ve probably admired their major work by him, The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), which is at the Barnes. It’s hard to believe it’s from the 19th Century because it is intensely strange and modern. A lion sniffs the sleeper who might be pretending to be asleep or actually dreaming. Either way, she smiles unconcerned. The folds of her hair become her hair, and her arm may become a guitar. There’s much here about the nature of creativity.

The MoMA piece is shown alongside two of his other undisputed masterpieces for the first time ever. These are Unpleasant Surprise (1899-1901) from the Barnes and The Snake Charmer (1907) from the Musée d’Orsay. In the former, a nude bather is surprised by a comically menacing bear as a hunter simultaneously shoots the bear, which might explain her curious pose and expression. As Christopher Green writes in the catalogue, “Is she a victim in mortal danger at all?” The catalogue explains further that the work “tapped into a contemporary taste for erotic encounters between humans and wild beasts,” and it does feel possible that the adjective was meant to be ironic.

The Snake Charmer was made for Berthe Delaunay, mother of the modernist Robert Delaunay, and of course, has its own connotations. The charmer is feminine but also not quite human, with skin as black as the night, hair below the knees and perhaps some kind of fur. She’s a weird black hole at the center of a lush, layered and false-looking jungle, drawing snakes not just to her but into her world of shadows. Perhaps Gen-Z can relate to these complex views on heterosexuality, where there is as much to fear as there is to celebrate.

“Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets” is on view at the Barnes Foundation through February 22, 2026.

More exhibition reviews

• “Nigerian Modernism” Reframes the Story of Modern African Art

• At the Getty Research Institute, the Guerrilla Girls Mark 40 Years of Calling Out the Art World

• Musée Marmottan Monet’s “The Empire of Sleep” Considers Slumber as an Artistic Trope

• “Thirst” at The Wellcome Collection Dives Deep into the Politics of Water

• Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”