Portrait of Henri Rousseau

Portrait of Henri Rousseau (1911) commemorates the recently deceased self-taught French painter who had died in September 1910 and whose work became a touchstone for the German Expressionist and early abstract artists associated with Der Blaue Reiter. Rousseau's naïve style — flat forms, directness of image, disregard for academic convention — was admired by Picasso, Kandinsky, and Marc as evidence that powerful art could be made outside institutional training and stylistic sophistication. Kandinsky included Rousseau's work in the first Blaue Reiter Almanac of 1912 alongside folk art, children's drawings, and medieval woodcuts as evidence that authentic spiritual art transcended academic norms. Marc's portrait on glass uses a folk art technique — Hinterglasmalerei, painting on the back of glass — that was itself associated with Bavarian folk tradition and was being enthusiastically explored by the Blaue Reiter circle as a form of non-academic pictorial making.

The Hinterglasmalerei technique — reverse painting on glass — creates a distinctive luminous surface and requires working in reverse order of normal painting. The method aligns the portrait's material with its subject's outsider artistic status, the folk technique honouring Rousseau's naive idiom