Conversation with Philips Rylands

It naturally arises to wonder, when looking at this painting titled Soccer Players by Henri Rousseau, why the man in the center of the work is holding the ball in his hand.
Is it perhaps obvious that it’s rugby? The ball could be oval, and the second player in the pink and blue striped tracksuit seems to be reaching out to catch it, while the player on the left, in red and yellow, appears to have missed his chance to grab and tackle the opponent holding the ball. Or maybe he is doing what soccer players often do, that is, tugging on the opponent’s jersey? Or perhaps there is another explanation.

In the eccentric naïve world imagined by this primitivist, rules do not exist, everything is possible, and this is simply how Rousseau envisioned the sport of soccer.
Only the clear-eyed perspective of Cornelia Lauf, author of the artwork’s description on the Guggenheim Museum’s website in New York, where the painting is housed, recognized the man in pajamas, as Lauf calls him, as a rugby player.
So, why wasn’t the painting titled The Rugby Players? As the American scholar Roger Shattuck observed in The Banquet Years, the absence of any sense of movement in this enchanting painting is due to the lack of shadows.
Despite the clear sky, the figures cast no shadows. Shattuck also wryly points out how the two players in yellow have blond hair, while those in blue have dark hair; all sport mustaches, but the sock colors alternate.

Although known as Le Douanier, Rousseau was not a customs officer, but rather a gabelou, a tax collector, from 1869 to 1895. This was not at the time he painted The Soccer Players, which was towards the end of his life, but before he became a full-time painter. He was a simple man, good-looking, fond of women, an upright individual who had never committed any crimes. A sophisticated naïf, a violin player who would sometimes beg on the streets to ease his poverty.
He was born in northeastern France, in the same town as Alfred Jarry, with whom he later became friends in Paris. Guillaume Apollinaire admired him and spun myths about his life that he had gone to Mexico with the troops sent by Napoleon III, that he had seen the jungles of South America which he later depicted in his paintings, and that as a soldier he single-handedly saved the town of Dreux during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.
A dinner held in his honor by Picasso in 1908, the year of this painting, has become a legendary episode from the pre-World War I period when Paris was the cradle of the avant-garde art movement.
Rousseau exhibited regularly in public salons, and although his paintings were often ridiculed, his Sleeping Gypsy is today one of the most admired paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
But why was he so admired? Why did Apollinaire, Jarry, Picasso, Braque, Jacob, Uhde, Delaunay, Vlaminck, Brancusi, and later even Léger, Kandinsky, and Beckmann see this Sunday painter’s work as so modern? Although I have tried to answer this question, I find it incredibly difficult to do so with the same clarity, simplicity, and certainty that Rousseau used in his paintings and without resorting to art critical jargon.

It is as difficult to answer this question as it is to be certain about which sport is depicted in the work by the French artist.